How the Book of Mormon Came to Pass

[Nofear]

Here's a link to the 1989 exhibition of Kircher's works: https://ia902905.us.archive.org/32/items/athanasiuskirche00merr/athanasiuskirche00merr.pdf

Apparently part of the claim is that the Church acquired Kircher's works and Hugh Nibley or other promptly buried them/hid them away in the special collecions of the Harold B. Lee library.   Note that special permission is required: https://archives.lib.byu.edu/repositories/byu-archives/archival_objects/ref106_biy

Personally I find it more consistent with Occam's razor that the Church with its interest in reformation akin material in the 1600's and 1700's and interest in Egyptology provides a much more natural explanation for ies acquisition. Also one just doesn't hand delicate centuries old documents to any ol person lest damage occur. Consequently, labor to publish was started leading to publication of its collection later.

The Church apparently still continues its acquisition of Kirtcher material (announcing when it gete something).

https://scblog.lib.byu.edu/2016/09/13/athanasius-kircher-and-his-cabinet-of-curiosities/

[Zosimus]

9 hours ago, Nofear said:

Here's a link to the 1989 exhibition of Kircher's works: https://ia902905.us.archive.org/32/items/athanasiuskirche00merr/athanasiuskirche00merr.pdf

Apparently part of the claim is that the Church acquired Kircher's works and Hugh Nibley or other promptly buried them/hid them away in the special collecions of the Harold B. Lee library.   Note that special permission is required: https://archives.lib.byu.edu/repositories/byu-archives/archival_objects/ref106_biy

I don't see a conspiracy of any sort with the Kircher collection, but no doubt it will become a conspiracy as tiktok catches wind of Barrachius Nephi. It looks like the collection is set to be opened 35 years after creation of the records, which looks to be next year, for one folder at least.

This is a pretty good summary of BYU's intentions wrt the Kircher collection, from the link you shared:

"Within the past decade there has been a resurgence of interest in Kircher. His works are becoming more difficult to acquire as demand increases. It is likely that in the next decade scholars will reevaluate his contributions to such fields as science, Egyptology, and music. Such a reevaluation is long overdue. The Harold B. Lee Library at Brigham Young University has one of the most significant collections of Kircheriana in the country. The collection reflects the University's commitment to research on the six- teenth and seventeenth centuries. Many departments on campus emphasize this period in their curricula because of the momentous transitions taking place at that time in music, religion, politics, litera- ture, and, of course, science. Kircher's works are an important source for scholars to gain a full picture of the seventeenth century. But Kircher is not important only to the student of the seventeenth century. Although now superseded by modern scholarship, Kircher's work in such fields as Egyptology and religion is still a gold mine of curiosities and information not found in other sources. The acquisition of Kircher's Egyptian works is the result of the University's long-standing interest in Egyptology, evidenced in the archeological work currently being carried out in the Fayum and in the extensive collection of works on Egyptology available in the library—including the complete set of the magnificent, 23-volume Description de Egypte (1809-28), a monumental attempt to describe in full the ruins of ancient Egypt. The Egyptian collection also includes the first edition of Champollion's two-volume work on hieroglyphics Precis du systeme hieroglyphique des anciens Egyptiens (1824). Kircher's works are especially pertinent to religious studies because they record the conflict between the age of orthodoxy and the emerging age of science, a conflict not only between men but within men. Kircher's works reveal the conflict within himself, between his dogged tenacity to hold to the orthodox and his insatiable desire for scientific knowledge, and the compromises he was forced to make. The contributions of Kircher to a startling variety of fields will perhaps prove more significant than scholars of the past two centuries have thought. Given BYU's commitment to and interest in these areas and the considerable number of Kircher's works included in the library collections, the University is poised to play a significant role in the reevaluation of Athanasius Kircher."

I think its wonderful BYU is preserving Kircher material. He truly was an important figure in the 17th century and I believe he did have an indirect role in the restoration. If it weren't for Kircher we probably wouldn't have many of the early accounts of the encounters of Christianity with Africa and Asia. For example, Kircher's work on the Nestorian Stele, in my opinion, sets the stage for the gold plate narrative. As mentioned above, Kircher believed that China was colonized by Egyptians, and that the hieroglyphs being discovered in China were related to Egyptian. As one translation of Kircher's China Illustrata puts it: "For over two hundred years, Kircher’s China Illustrata was probably the single most important written source for shaping the Western understanding of China and its neighbors." This is evident in the writings of scholars like Humboldt and Rafinesque in their extension of many of Kircher's ideas to the Americas. 

Edited April 22, 2024 by Zosimus

[why me]

The title of this thread has been asked ever since the book of mormon became public. How it came to be? I think that we would need to try to put ourselves  in the shoes of Joseph Smith and his intentions for the book of mormon if he is a fraud. If one wants to start of new church in Joseph's time, why introduce a new book that claims to be something that it is not? If I would be in his shoes I would know that I would receive immense backlash from the population when the book was introduced. Much better to ignore a new book that I wrote or 'borrowed' from someone else and just organize a new protestant church. Joseph Smith could have been a new Knox or a Calvin or a Wesley. Instead he became a renegade. So why did he keep at it until the last breath. And then, have his family support him regardless of the life threatening persecution, if they knew he was a fraud. And if I would be myself in Emma's place, I would have been pulling my hair out why he would continue with the fabrication and all the suffering. So I believe that something else was happening with the book of mormon. Emma had the opportunity to destroy the church when Young decided to head westward and take a large amount of people with him. But she clung on to Joseph as a prophet and the book of mormon. Quite amazing.

[Nofear]

Apparently Lars Nielson in his book describes Joseph as a pious fraud -- a knowing fraud but one with the best of intentions. But, as you point out, there were so very points of failure that this explanation is problematic too. The Kircher conspiracy theory does two things: 1) it is a tacit acceptance that prior explanatory models are insufficient and 2) makes the pious fraud conspiracy theory even less likely by introducing several more moving parts and additional actors.

The Barrachius Nephi is an interesting data point. Nephi isn't exactly a common name.

[Benjamin McGuire]

On 4/20/2024 at 10:16 AM, Zosimus said:

Its a real stretch to claim that Humboldt's 1814 publication on the origins of Native Americans wasn't known to Americans.

Why isn't it a real stretch? I would agree with you that some Americans were certainly aware of it - particularly those in academic circles. Hyrum Smith is not one of those individuals. And he wouldn't have become aware of it in his time spent at Moore's School. You talk about Hyrum Smith in a grammar school (we aren't even talking about high school here) and you want to say that he was reading obscure books and was exposed to academic theories. The lack of context is what makes this a real stretch.

I'll go further. There were lots of theories during this time period about the origins of Native Americans. I suspect that you aren't aware of most of them - primarily because you have this interest in seeing the Book of Mormon in a certain light. I don't think that you actually have a good grasp of early American literature because you don't actually read early American literature.

Let's go back to Humboldt. The 1814 text was a translation from the 1810 French edition and was published in London. Anyone can read it here. You should try reading it, instead of simply googling through its contents.

While there are a lot of interesting things in Humboldt's theory of Native American origins, a few of them are worth describing here. Humboldt believed that the natives of South America all originated from a place north of the Gila River in Arizona. They may have come elsewhere to get to that point (he suggests both an Asian origin, or the northwest coast of North America), but the South American natives, he insisted, all came from Arizona. The Toltecs, Humboldt argued, first arrived (moving south) in the Valley of Mexico around 544 AD. This first wave of immigration southward was followed by the Chichimecs, the Cirimecs, the Zapatecs, and then finally the Aztecs who represented a final wave of migration occurring around 1170 AD. His views, he said, were based on the fact that his experience with New Spain showed a much more advanced population than those further south. Most of this comes out in his earlier Political Essay on the Kingdom of New Spain.

By the time we get to his Personal Narrative, he had determined that the Native Americans were most likely of Asian origins - but, his work clearly spells out how he sees this occurring. The Native Americans came from Asia across the Bering Straits, and traveled from north to south across North and then South America. But Humboldt also asserts that the Native American populations were a result of a single prehistoric migration that created a unified race in the Americas. Humboldt's views were heavily influenced by the fact that the Bering Strait region was finally documented for Europeans in the 1770s - so while we have vague notions of this sort of migration prior to Humboldt, this is somewhat novel to Humboldt. Now we can get into greater details, and talk about what Humboldt said (and quote his writings), but for me, this isn't particularly conducive to the narrative of the Book of Mormon.

But getting back to my earlier point -

In Joseph's environment (and at least to the extent that Humboldt is there), we have dozens of theories. There are the Atlantean Indian origin theory - which first appears in 1535. This theory was reinvigorated in the early 1800s, and was continued to be discussed in the 1880s (Ignatius Donnelly). There is the Biblical origin theory - these are the different ten lost tribes versions. They start primarily with James Adair. Along side Adair, you have the LDS version. Then there was Manasseh Ben Israel's version (1650, Origin de los Americanos, estos es esperanza de Israel). There was a related version of this published as an add-on to the 4th edition of Itinerarium Novi Testamenti. The addition is anonymous, but was titled A Synopsis or Complete System of the Indian Nations, Proving Them Out of All Doubt in Belief, to
be Originally Jews, Sent into Captivity by the Assyrian Kings. It was published in 1784. This one argued for the lost tribes traveling across the Bering Strait. These are all European accounts. We do have two american (non-LDS) versions. Elias Boudinot (founder of the American Bible Society) published his A Star in the West in 1816. He follows Humboldt's suggestion, and has the Native Americans as Tartars, but argues that the Tartars themselves had Israelite origins. Mordecai Noah published his Discourse on the Evidences of the American Indians Being the Descendants of the Ten Lost
Tribes of Israel in 1837. Noah has Israelites going to Ethiopia, then to the Indies, then up the Northeastern coast through Asia and eventually across the Bering Strait, and subsequently migrating down the northwestern coast of America and spreading themselves across the American continents. He also relies on both Humboldt and Boudinot for the migration details, but heavily engages with Adair among others. Getting away from Israelite origins, Ira Hill published his Antiquities of America Explained in 1831, claiming that the Native Americans were Phoenicians or Tyrians. The Tartars, he argued, were disgruntled Phoenicians who migrated East. The Reverend George Jones argued for Phoenicians as well in his 1843 work (An Original History of Ancient American Founded upon the Ruins of Antiquity). The list goes on and on.

I bring all of this up for a couple of reasons. First, the fact is that of all of these authors, the most popular in America by far was James Adair. He lived in the US for most of his life. If we want to discuss which of these theories would have been most familiar to Americans, it would be his. Humboldt's claim to fame was that he was influential to a group of academics - and perhaps the most important of these was Charles Darwin. But what we get out of the history of the literature is a set of propositions that runs counter to your narrative of the Book of Mormon. Humboldt was the first to introduce the idea of a migration crossing the Bering Strait, and spreading out across the continent from the northwest tip of the continent and extending eventually down to the southern most part of South America. The part of his argument that stays consistently in those who used him is this trip across the Bering Strait and the subsequent land migrations, as well as the idea that there was effectively a single migration to the American continents that was responsible for the native populations.

So, let me get back to my point. When we use digital search engines to look for parallels, we miss context. When we take the context that we find in electronic searches and then reformat it to best match the theory we are trying to prove, that is when we fall into parallelomania.

Now, I am also going to back and point something out that I have mentioned several times in the other thread. Most of these theories are wrong. There may be some accurate things in there - but only in a sense. The population of South America didn't come from Humboldt's waves of immigrants between 544 and 1177 AD. Such ideas were fairly easily disproved once archaeological understanding advanced. It may be that much of the indigenous population of the Americas came across the Bering Strait - but it would have happened in a time-frame completely inconsistent with all of these narratives. In other words, Humboldt's history is a fiction (even if he didn't mean it as a fiction). So, if you want to have Humboldt's history serving as inspiration for the Book of Mormon, you are essentially arguing that the Book of Mormon is based on a fiction.

On 4/20/2024 at 10:16 AM, Zosimus said:

OK but two Kircher books, one containing fragments of the Nephi manuscript, were referenced in 1814 in a book detailing the ruins of South America. There's no doubt that a scholar like Mitchill (who incidentally wrote the foreward to The Late War) would have been familiar with this book. It was very likely on his shelf, and he probably lectured from it, based on his writings that echo some of the material. I won't get into that here though. 

Kirchner did not write a book containing a fragment of the Nephi manuscript.

Mitchill never used The Late War in his lectures. I am certain of this. The Late War was never used as an educational text. I detail this in my published response to the Johnson brothers.

Mitchill almost certainly had never heard of the book until he was asked to provide the promotional text (it wasn't a forward) and was probably paid for it. This is sort of thing that eventually gets put on the inside fold of dust jackets (when books started having them). Much of Hunt's book is unoriginal. That you can find parallels to it in many places in unsurprising (I can find parallels to it in many places). Just make sure you look at the parallels that occur before 1816. And it's worth noting that he was a medical doctor - and when that book was published (1816-1819), Mitchell was teaching a the College of Physicians and Surgeons of New York (a medical school). That he would be using a history book for his lectures, written imitating the language of the King James bible is silly.

On 4/20/2024 at 10:16 AM, Zosimus said:

Speaking of Spaulding manuscripts, Solomon Spaulding's unpublished Romance of Celes does have some interesting similarities to Kircher's writings describing his vision of the cosmos. But we can discuss that when it is published, as I understand the author of the book mentioned in the OP will be doing. FWIW, i've skimmed through his book and nothing really stood out as new or convincing. Most of his stuff is Behrens and Broadhurst in a zoomer wrapper. But I am looking forward to reading his research on the complete Romance of Celes.

It isn't interesting.

This is the problem of parallelomania (especially when combined with digital search engines). Context is removed. What is similar is made to be the most important features of the text.

On 4/20/2024 at 10:16 AM, Zosimus said:

I'd disagree John Smith's lectures didn't enter into the public consciousness. Just look the publications of his students. View of the Hebrews and Manuscript Found. Its interesting

Then perhaps you could illustrate for us how this entered the public consciousness and where we can see it evidenced.

 

[Craig Speechly]

I'll never understand the need for all of the so called "How the Book of Mormon Came to Pass" Theories.  Isn't the most logical & simplest answer that Smith just dictated it to his scribes?  

[Zosimus]

1 hour ago, Benjamin McGuire said:

Why isn't it a real stretch? I would agree with you that some Americans were certainly aware of it - particularly those in academic circles. Hyrum Smith is not one of those individuals. And he wouldn't have become aware of it in his time spent at Moore's School. You talk about Hyrum Smith in a grammar school (we aren't even talking about high school here) and you want to say that he was reading obscure books and was exposed to academic theories. The lack of context is what makes this a real stretch.

I'll go further. There were lots of theories during this time period about the origins of Native Americans. I suspect that you aren't aware of most of them - primarily because you have this interest in seeing the Book of Mormon in a certain light. I don't think that you actually have a good grasp of early American literature because you don't actually read early American literature.

Let's go back to Humboldt. The 1814 text was a translation from the 1810 French edition and was published in London. Anyone can read it here. You should try reading it, instead of simply googling through its contents.

I have read it. I've also read his Views of Nature. Although I confess I skimmed through much of both as I was only interested in his comments on the migrations to the Americas.  I've discussed these in the other threads with you, so I'm surprised you're still accusing me of Google sniping all this stuff. I've read almost everything Adair has had to say on the peopling of the Americas, and Boudinot's Star in the West. Which I've discussed numerous times on this forum in the context of it being an imitation of Claudius Buchanan's more popular, and influential , The Star in the East. Its this text that I feel was most critical to the narrative of the Book of Mormon. You can find my comments on this forum on all this several places over the past few years. By the way, Buchanan's The Star in the East also references Kircher, in 1811.

1 hour ago, Benjamin McGuire said:

Kirchner did not write a book containing a fragment of the Nephi manuscript.

I linked to Colavito's article titled Fragments of Abenephius earlier.

1 hour ago, Benjamin McGuire said:

Mitchill never used The Late War in his lectures. I am certain of this. The Late War was never used as an educational text. I detail this in my published response to the Johnson brothers.

I never said he did. My comment on the Late War was parenthetical to what I was saying about Humboldt's book being known to Mitchill, if it wasn't on his bookshelf. It'd be a stretch to say Mitchill didn't know Humboldt. 

1 hour ago, Benjamin McGuire said:

That he would be using a history book for his lectures, written imitating the language of the King James bible is silly.

You're right, but I was talking about Humboldt's text, not Late War.

1 hour ago, Benjamin McGuire said:

It isn't interesting.

Didn't you start this post out by saying its important to read things before commenting on them? As far as I know, only a few people have read the whole thing, so can't really say much about it until its published. From the excerpts I've read, it is interesting. In particular: 

"God hath seen fit in his infinite mercy to elect you, as he has chosen others from the distant planets of the universe to his own glorious purposes; as vessels of mercy, intelligent, intellectual and spiritual vehicles, to convey his word to those who sit In darkness which (now) he promises to make powerful unto salvation, to all who believe. The evidence of your belief will always be present to deliver you from temptation and the powers of darkness, and in due time you will share the glory of our heavenly father in heaven and sit with him in his everlasting kingdom: -- Being second to my father the king, I make you my priests taking the Bishopric from unbelievers and gainsayers and giving you power over the spirits of the air, and power to convert souls by the excellency of truth without the vain pomp of wealth & power -- for these have ever had their minions in the darkest of times..

The unbelievers perceiving that God had determined to show his power in the temporal kingdom by changing the ancient priesthood which had always gone hand in hand with the kingdom of this world, began to look about for the means and measures to sustain as long as possible, the tottering fabric; and before they left the valley of Diamonds it was determined that their chief speaker should assume the name and office of prince Lamech and usurp the throne of his father and claim the powers of heaven and hell, and as fast as possible to annihilate all Florentians and their followers. They left the mountain and pushed forward with all speed for the Circle Islands, for here upon the Garden of Eden was the Royal palace; but before they arrived, the Circle Islands and all that vast Archipelago belonging to the royal family were converted and were sending out Florentine teachers in every direction...

The proposal was acceded to unanimously and the work is going on by day and by night amidst the shouts of praise and the melodies of the golden harps: -- Having revolutionized the Lunar kingdom and established a priesthood of the order of Melchizedek we joined the armies of Jupiter as they were again making suit to the Earth"

This text is attributed to Solomon Spaulding, not Dr. Solomon Spaulding, but the Solomon Spaulding that attended Dartmouth. I'm starting to think you have some sort of antiparallelomania, where nothing could possibly be parallel to anything, and you are sure of this before you even read the material. Some balance between the two extremes needs to be found.

[Zosimus]

3 hours ago, Benjamin McGuire said:

Then perhaps you could illustrate for us how this entered the public consciousness and where we can see it evidenced.

I've put this out in other threads on the forum, but will summarize here. I mentioned before that I'm presently doing research on a topic (mostly) unrelated to Mormonism. One side thread of that research involves a group of American Baptist missionaries from Salem MA, who in 1828 began developing a narrative that a gold book containing the words of God written for a specific tribe had been lost. It was said that this book would be returned in due time by people from across the sea, and that once it was recovered, the tribe would prosper. The Baptist missionaries had employed an elder of the tribe to help them with some translations of the New Testament. This man, wanting to know what was contained in the lost gold book of his people, went up on a mountain to fast and pray. After several weeks, a being in a white robe appeared to him and revealed the key to decipher the ancient script of his tribe. The man then taught others in his village this script, and eventually translated the contents of the gold book. This all takes place between 1828 and 1850. Some of the missionaries involved were from the Byfield/Bradford/Topsfield area, generally where Asael Smith and John Smith were from. They professed admiration for Nathanael Emmons, the uncle of Oliver Cowdery. The pastor of the local congregation was Elijah Parish, a good friend of Solomon Spaulding. Elijah Parish, a student of Dartmouth alongside Solomon Spaulding, had been appointed to the Byfield parish by Dr. John Smith of Dartmouth.

I'm writing this all up, and it'll take more time, but I hope that it will illustrate the lost gold book of God narrative had entered the public consciousness in the area between Hanover and Byfield in the early 19th century. It played out in two independent locations, on opposite sides of the world. One starting in New York in 1828 and the other starting in Amherst, Burma, in 1828. The missionaries behind the Amherst gold book narrative drew their inspiration from Buchanan's Star in the East, mentioned above. In Buchanan's text, he describes 1st temple Jews that migrated to India soon after the Babylonian captivity where they divide into two groups, based on skin color, white and black Jews. Buchanan describes their records, kept on brass plates and their Biblical scriptures that predate the apostles. It is precisely this account that motivated the Amherst missionaries to go and preach among the Indians.

I am not suggesting these two gold book narratives are related because there are certainly critical differences, which I am more than willing to share and discuss. Also, the early Mormons did not directly interact with the early Burma missionaries, as far as I can tell. But these two gold book narratives did come from the same cultural setting, and the same time and place.

Edited April 22, 2024 by Zosimus

[webbles]

42 minutes ago, Zosimus said:

This text is attributed to Solomon Spaulding, not Dr. Solomon Spaulding, but the Solomon Spaulding that attended Dartmouth.

Wait?  There are two Solomon Spauldings?

[Zosimus]

17 minutes ago, webbles said:

Wait?  There are two Solomon Spauldings?

Yes. Solomon Spaulding had a cousin named Dr. Solomon Spaulding. It seems he submitted an unpublished manuscript called Romance of Celes to the Library of Congress, which was attributed to the older Solomon Spaulding.

[Nevo]

20 minutes ago, Zosimus said:

Yes. Solomon Spaulding had a cousin named Dr. Solomon Spaulding. It seems he submitted an unpublished manuscript called Romance of Celes to the Library of Congress, which was attributed to the older Solomon Spaulding.

It seems to me that we should regard the Library of Congress categorization as a misattribution.

The title page says it's "by Dr. Solomon Spalding." That is, Solomon Spalding (1797-1862), not Solomon Spalding (1761-1816). And the manuscript is in the handwriting of Dr. Spalding's wife, whom he married in 1832.

Dale Broadhurst says that Dr. Spalding was "a cousin (one generation removed)" of the earlier Spalding. They weren't close relatives and lived in different states. There were dozens if not hundreds of Spalding cousins around in the early 19th century. So how is the older Spalding's manuscript supposed to have made its way to the younger Spalding? This doesn't seem at all likely to me.

Edited April 22, 2024 by Nevo

[Zosimus]

2 minutes ago, Nevo said:

It seems to me that we should regard the Library of Congress categorization as a misattribution.

The title page says it's "by Dr. Solomon Spalding." That is, Solomon Spalding (1797-1862), not Solomon Spalding (1761-1816). And the manuscript is in the handwriting of Dr. Spalding's wife, whom he married in 1832.

Dale Broadhurst says that Dr. Spalding was "a cousin (one generation removed)" from the earlier Spalding. They weren't close relatives and lived in different states. There were dozens if not hundreds of Spalding "cousins" around in the early 19th century.  So how is the older Spalding's manuscript supposed to have made its way to the younger Spalding? This doesn't seem at all likely to me.

I share your doubts. Broadhurst did read it, and his assessment was the Dr. and his wife rewrote/reworked an earlier manuscript. I prefer to read the thing before reaching any conclusions

[Tacenda]

2 hours ago, Zosimus said:

I've put this out in other threads on the forum, but will summarize here, I mentioned before that I'm presently doing research on a topic (mostly) unrelated to Mormonism. One side thread of that research involves a group of American Baptist missionaries from Salem MA, who in 1828 began developing a narrative that a gold book containing the words of God written for a specific tribe had been lost. It was said that this book would be returned in due time by people from across the sea, and that once it was recovered, the tribe would prosper. The Baptist missionaries had employed an elder of the tribe to help them with some translations of the New Testament. This man, wanting to know what was contained in the lost gold book of his people, went up on a mountain to fast and pray. After several weeks, a being in a white robe appeared to him and revealed the key to decipher the ancient script of his tribe. The man then taught others in his village this script, and eventually translated the contents of the gold book. This all takes place between 1828 and 1850. Some of the missionaries involved were from the Byfield/Bradford/Topsfield area, generally where Asael Smith and John Smith were from. They professed admiration for Nathanael Emmons, the uncle of Oliver Cowdery. The pastor of the local congregation was Elijah Parish, a good friend of Solomon Spaulding. Elijah Parish, a student of Dartmouth alongside Solomon Spaulding, had been appointed to the Byfield parish by Dr. John Smith of Dartmouth.

I'm writing this all up, and it'll take more time, but I hope that it will illustrate the lost gold book of God narrative had entered the public consciousness in the area between Hanover and Byfield in the early 19th century. It played out in two independent locations, on opposite sides of the world. One starting in New York in 1828 and the other starting in Amherst, Burma, in 1828. The missionaries behind the Amherst gold book narrative drew their inspiration from Buchanan's Star in the East, mentioned above. In Buchanan's text, he describes 1st temple Jews that migrated to India soon after the Babylonian captivity where they divide into two groups, based on skin color, white and black Jews. Buchanan describes their records, kept on brass plates and their Biblical scriptures that predate the apostles. It is precisely this account that motivated the Amherst missionaries to go and preach among the Indians.

I am not suggesting these two gold book narratives are related because there are certainly critical differences, which I am more than willing to share and discuss. Also, the early Mormons did not directly interact with the early Burma missionaries, as far as I can tell. But these two gold book narratives did come from the same cultural setting, and the same time and place.

I do think Joseph Smith used teachings, stories and incidences surrounding him from a youth on that could have helped with the Book of Mormon. And he used someone else's work for the translation of the KJV Bible as well according to this article, but I know there's disagreement out there. http://jur.byu.edu/?p=21296

Edited April 22, 2024 by Tacenda

[Nevo]

Well, I've reached a preliminary conclusion about Lars Nielsen's work so far. It's utter nonsense.

This seems to be Nielsen's main argument:

Quote

Nephi in The Book of Mormon was to some degree intentionally modeled on (or named after) Kircher’s Barachias Nephi, as opposed to being a coincidence. . . .  More than one hundred years after Kircher had passed away, memes from his life and works got into the mind of Dartmouth’s Professor of Oriental Languages (the second link in the Kircherism chain) as he read, translated, and studied the works of the immortal encyclopaedist. Professor Smith transmitted some of those memes to his student, Solomon Spalding (the third link) as part of his graduate-level research and in the form of a fiction that Professor Smith had started but did not publish, fearing that it might injure his reputation as a theological writer. Professor Smith was therefore both a source and an influence on what eventually became The Book of Mormon. After finishing his master’s work, Spalding served as a Dartmouth missionary for ten years, after which he deconstructed his faith and became an atheist. When Professor Smith died in 1809, Spalding decided to finally finish what I now call Stories from Lost Manuscripts Found, which consisted of several nested storylines, including the F, N, J, and M texts. Some or all of these sources ended up in the possession of Sidney Rigdon (the fourth link).

— Lars Nielsen, How The Book of Mormon Came to Pass: The Second Greatest Show on Earth, pp. 306–307 (Kindle edition).

The main problem with Nielsen's "Kircher-Nephi" theory is that there's no evidence for it. There is no evidence that Professor John Smith ever read anything by Kircher or wrote a "fiction" inspired by him. There is no evidence that Professor Smith and Solomon Spalding ever interacted after the latter's graduation in 1785. And there is no credible evidence for Rigdon coming into possession of a Spalding manuscript or for Rigdon meeting Joseph Smith prior to 1830.

The "Nephi" thing is interesting, but the name is also in the Apocrypha and is not far off of "Nephilim" mentioned in the book of Genesis (or it could be Egyptian). Likewise, I don't see an obvious connection between the Liahona and Kircher's magnetic clock. There are some similarities but nothing that demands that the two items must be linked.
 

Edit: The word nephilim isn't mentioned in KJV Genesis 6:4, but is in Adam Clarke's commentary.

Edited April 23, 2024 by Nevo

[ZealouslyStriving]

It always breaks down at Rigdon- it's hard to pass on info. to someone you haven't yet met.

Edited April 22, 2024 by ZealouslyStriving

[Benjamin McGuire]

21 hours ago, Zosimus said:

I linked to Colavito's article titled Fragments of Abenephius earlier.

My bad. I thought you were referring to something about the Book of Mormon Nephi. As that article points out:

Quote

No writer before Kircher makes reference to Abenephius, and no one after him has ever found the book in question. Worse, Abenephius’ identity isn’t even consistent in Kircher’s own work. Originally, he referred to the writer as Rabbi Barachias Nephi of Babylon, and in time he became Abenephius the Arab, a scholar of presumably Egyptian extraction. “Babylon” was the old name for Cairo, suggesting the origin of the connection—an attempt to make the text more Egyptian—and Rabbi Nephi could easily slide into Abba Nephi and Abenephius. Why the change occurred, though, is unclear. What did not change is the allegation that this slippery character wrote a treatise on the hieroglyphs of Egypt explaining what they mean and how to interpret them. The interpretations were, in the fragments Kircher preserved, little more than Neo-Platonic philosophizing with very little connection to anything real, but they are surprisingly similar to those in Ibn Wahshiyya’s book without actually duplicating them. If Ibn Wahshiyya’s book is a forgery based on Kircher, this would be the inspiration. If it is not a fake, then the similarity would suggest Kircher’s source was real.

So, I am not sure what your point is here.

21 hours ago, Zosimus said:

You're right, but I was talking about Humboldt's text, not Late War.

Ok, I misread you.

23 hours ago, Benjamin McGuire said:

OK but two Kircher books, one containing fragments of the Nephi manuscript, were referenced in 1814 in a book detailing the ruins of South America. There's no doubt that a scholar like Mitchill (who incidentally wrote the foreward to The Late War) would have been familiar with this book. It was very likely on his shelf, and he probably lectured from it, based on his writings that echo some of the material. I won't get into that here though. 

So ... let me get this straight. Mitchill (you argue) had Humboldt's text on his shelf (possible, I suppose). He used it in lectures (unlikely at best - he was still teaching at a medical school). But the kicker for you is that Humboldt references Kircher, and the Kircher text references an unknown text identified by its author - that you identify as being named Nephi.

Now, lets also be clear of the problem that this creates for your illusionary chain. Your linked source notes that the name Nephi never showed up in print in Kircher's books - only in his early manuscript:

Quote

By the time excerpts from the manuscript saw print in Kircher’s works, the author’s name had been transformed first to Barachias Abenephi and then to Abenephius the Arab, by which name he is conventionally known today.

Or, to quote from another source:

Quote

Although the manuscript that Peiresc saw is lost, Kircher cited its author frequently in his hieroglyphic studies, quoting passages in Arabic with Latin translations. By then Rabbi Barachias Nephi of Babylon had metamorphosed into "Abenephius the Arab," which may have prevented previous scholars from identifying the connection. (p. 84).

So, Nephi wouldn't be a name known to Humboldt in connection with the text described by Kircher. Humboldt would only have known the text (assuming he was familiar with it at all) by the name Abenephius the Arab. And this connection to the Book of Mormon disappears.

21 hours ago, Zosimus said:

Didn't you start this post out by saying its important to read things before commenting on them? As far as I know, only a few people have read the whole thing, so can't really say much about it until its published. From the excerpts I've read, it is interesting. In particular: 

It's not that interesting.

Do you know what the word 'coincidence' means? When we deal with parallels, we have to consider the possibility of coincidence. We have to consider the possibility of echoes.

There is this strange problem in your theories in that you seem to want to relate the Book of Mormon to some real historical context - but you want to do this through similarities to fictional narratives. This just doesn't work.

And there is no actual evidence of a connection between Joseph Smith and Spaulding. It just isn't there. This absence of a connection has nothing to do with parallels. We can find parallels routinely between narratives that are written by people who have absolutely no connection to each other. The parallels between those narratives aren't meaningful in terms of trying to show a possibility of a connection. They may be meaningful only in a very broad sense of expressing issues that are of a concern to humanity in all times and in all places (we all share a remarkable level of similarity in our experience of life). But in terms of literary connections, it isn't meaningful. So you add this:

21 hours ago, Zosimus said:

I'm starting to think you have some sort of antiparallelomania, where nothing could possibly be parallel to anything, and you are sure of this before you even read the material. Some balance between the two extremes needs to be found.

I think that you misunderstand the issues here. Parallels can be very helpful. I use them all the time. But there has to be something real in the connection. Look at what you bolded as interesting - " established a priesthood of the order of Melchizedek." Why is this not interesting? Because it comes out of Hebrews 7:11 in the New Testament. It is far more likely that the Book of Mormon use of the idea of an order of Melchizedek comes from the New Testament than that it comes from Spaulding. But, if you want to argue that the Spaulding text is interesting because of the parallel, the argument has to explain why it matters that we see it coming from Spaulding and not from the New Testament (or somewhere else). A string of conjectures about how Spaulding influenced the Book of Mormon does not rise to the level of evidence. Instead it creates a circular argument. We can show definitively that the earliest claims of a connection between the Book of Mormon and Spaulding's story are fiction. We know that while they were signed by different people, they were all authored by a single person. This isn't about parallels, its about the language itself that gets used. We can see that the later claims about a Spaulding connection are derivatives from the earlier ones (they create a dialogue not only between each other but with criticism of those earlier claims). And Broadhurst takes this even further by suggesting that perhaps these are all related to a different manuscript by a different Spaulding - but this is an impossibility in the context of those earlier and later statements. It doesn't work to create anything that suggests to us that we should expect a significant relationship.

This idea of an unpublished Spaudling manuscript is problematic for similar reasons. The content that you provide isn't particularly interesting to us from the point of view of a literary relationship because there isn't anything there that is particularly unique to these two texts. In fact, there isn't anything that would suggest a connection in the narratives by themselves. And only if we start to accept other assumptions (which I think are unjustifiable) do we find some sort of basis to think that parallels might be of interest in some way.

Any discussion of parallels really needs to include several distinct parts -

1: whether or not a direct connection (a genetic connection) is likely (or even possible).

2: an examination of the similarities in context along with the differences

3: a broad search to see if the alleged similarities exist elsewhere (that is, are they a part of the literary ecosystem which produced both texts in question). Finding the similarities elsewhere greatly diminishes the argument of significance.

4: a close reading to see how the similarities function within the respective narratives.

There can be a lot more to it than this - but this forms the core arguments that are necessary. Your arguments tend to fail across the entire spectrum. You make these arguments about likelihood - but they aren't falsifiable. I grew up in one of those small rural communities in which everyone knows everyone. The kinds of discussions that occur are about the weather, the farm, the new house being built down the road. They aren't about obscure books published on a different continent. I don't know what sorts of books you read in High School, but I know what I read. Hyrum Smith went to a school that was free because of his poverty. His strength was in math (at least that's what the limited documentation tells us). And somehow, as a grade school student he is suddenly reading all of these obscure books (and so were all the people in the neighborhood?). Your arguments don't really make sense. They come across as a desperate need to forge a connection so that the arguments about parallels might begin to make sense.

Do you think that this sequence of implausible events is more likely than the possibility that Joseph Smith simply made it up? I certainly don't think so. This is the problem of coincidence. How do your arguments create a likelihood that exceeds the likelihood of coincidence? Your anecdotal assertions don't do the job.

This is what makes it uninteresting before we even begin.

Show me an identical significantly unique direct quote shared by two narratives, and I will pay much more attention to it. You don't need interpretation there ...

Edited April 23, 2024 by Benjamin McGuire

[Nevo]

By the way, I did some digging around last night to see what books were in the Dartmouth College library in John Smith's lifetime (1751–1809).

Earlier in the thread, Zosimus mentioned the 1850 source that Nielsen uses to state that the Dartmouth College library had a copy of Kircher's Oedipus Aegyptiacus pre-1850. If this information is correct, it was acquired after the lifetime of Professor Smith.

During Smith's lifetime, the library was relatively small and contained no books by Kircher. We know this because we have records of what the library contained in 1775 and 1825. (There was also a catalogue published in 1809, but I haven't been able to locate an online version — it might be in Shaw-Shoemaker's Early American Imprints II). It's possible that Smith had heard of Kircher (he was mentioned a few times in Cotton Mather's The Christian Philosopher), but it is highly unlikely that Smith ever laid eyes on any of Kircher's works himself. Unlike Cotton Mather, Smith never traveled to Europe and wasn't a member of the Royal Society. I doubt very much that Kircher was ever on his radar.

If you're wondering about the society libraries at Dartmouth, I checked those too. They didn't have any books by Kircher either:

https://exhibits.library.dartmouth.edu/s/HistoricalAccountability/item/3194#?xywh=-508%2C-31%2C1696%2C1060&cv=

https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=njp.32101073753459&seq=1

In 1830, the largest academic library in the United States had only 3 books by Kircher.

Edited April 23, 2024 by Nevo

[Zosimus]

2 hours ago, Benjamin McGuire said:

My bad. I thought you were referring to something about the Book of Mormon Nephi.

All good I can see how one might get the two Nephis confused 

2 hours ago, Benjamin McGuire said:

So, I am not sure what your point is here.

Hold up. This Kircher-Smith hypothesis is not mine. I think you are confusing my response to your comment that Kircher had never been mentioned in an American publication before 1850 as some sort of support for the conclusions in the book from the OP. As I mentioned earlier, I bought the Kindle version of this book and it left me unconvinced. Felt like a zoomer version of Behrens and Broadhurst.

2 hours ago, Benjamin McGuire said:

So ... let me get this straight. Mitchill (you argue) had Humboldt's text on his shelf (possible, I suppose). He used it in lectures (unlikely at best - he was still teaching at a medical school). But the kicker for you is that Humboldt references Kircher, and the Kircher text references an unknown text identified by its author - that you identify as being named Nephi.

Now, lets also be clear of the problem that this creates for your illusionary chain. Your linked source notes that the name Nephi never showed up in print in Kircher's books - only in his early manuscript:

When I say Mitchell's lectures, I mean the addresses he gave on the origins of the Native Americans. I only mention Kircher because you had made the claim that nobody in 1820s America would have known Kircher. I asked for a CFR, which you barely provided, and then I provided examples of mentions of Kircher in publications before 1850. I provided links to Humbodlt, and a publication that seems to draw heavily from Mitchill. I also referenced Buchanan's The Star in the East which references Kircher, and was so popular in the 1820s that it went through five prints in the USA.

"Buchanan's A Star in the East became one of the unlikeliest of bestsellers in American history. A Hartford, Connecticut, printer published the sermon in 1809 and, in less than a year, an Albany, New York, printer went through at least nine editions. Before the end of 1809, the New York City printer J. Seymour went through at least eight editions, and printers in Pittsburgh and Philadelphia published it. In 1810, a Chillicothe, Ohio, printer went through at least ten editions. A few upstate New York printers found the work saleable. At least two printers in New Hampshire and in Massachusetts, as well as others in Connecticut and Pennsylvania also published the sermon. By July 1810, a Danbury, Connecticut, firm published a commentary on A Star in the East, without including the whole of the original, because, they explained, it was already so widely available." (source)

I bring all this up as a response to your CFR again claiming that Kircher wasn't mentioned in American publication before 1850. Instead of acknowledging your misstatement you turn the thread into a discussion about my illusionary chain of Kircherisms

2 hours ago, Benjamin McGuire said:

Do you know what the word 'coincidence' means? When we deal with parallels, we have to consider the possibility of coincidence. We have to consider the possibility of echoes.

I have no problem accepting Kircher's Nephi and the Book of Mormon Nephi as a coincidence. Indeed that had been my conclusion since I'd looked at it several years ago. But I reserve the right to change my opinion on this as I go

2 hours ago, Benjamin McGuire said:

There is this strange problem in your theories in that you seem to want to relate the Book of Mormon to some real historical context - but you want to do this through similarities to fictional narratives. This just doesn't work.

How is this any different from what you might be doing? Don't you relate the Book of Mormon to some real historical context? Are you not supporting this view by referencing the fictional Book of Esther? Have I misunderstood your views? Maybe it'd help if you just came right out and said whether or not you believe the Book of Mormon is a historical account of Israelites in America or a book of fictional scripture, like Esther.

2 hours ago, Benjamin McGuire said:

And there is no actual evidence of a connection between Joseph Smith and Spaulding. It just isn't there. This absence of a connection has nothing to do with parallels. We can find parallels routinely between narratives that are written by people who have absolutely no connection to each other. The parallels between those narratives aren't meaningful in terms of trying to show a possibility of a connection. They may be meaningful only in a very broad sense of expressing issues that are of a concern to humanity in all times and in all places (we all share a remarkable level of similarity in our experience of life). But in terms of literary connections, it isn't meaningful.

I'm not convinced the Spaulding manuscript hypothesis provides the best explanation. That's why I hadn't mentioned Spaulding at all over the last few weeks of back and forth. I believe Joseph Smith to be the author/translator, and my hypothesis is that his interpretations were influenced by his environment, from Hanover to Palmyra. But the most important environmental influence came through Martin Harris' trip to New York, and his discussions with whatever learned person he might find in the months previous to the commencement of the translation, including those we know of: Samuel Mitchell, Luther Bradish and Charles Anthon. These discussions with scholars were more important than Dartmouth IMO.

2 hours ago, Benjamin McGuire said:

This idea of an unpublished Spaudling manuscript is problematic for similar reasons. The content that you provide isn't particularly interesting to us from the point of view of a literary relationship because there isn't anything there that is particularly unique to these two texts.

Its something like 400 pages long. Let's read it before we comment on it. I've drawn no conclusions until then. I mention it as interesting because I think most people are unaware it exists, and since it has a more Biblical tone than Manuscript Found, its worth a full read. But then again, it very well might not even be a Solomon Spaulding manuscript. No skin off my back. I'd be satisfied to know it.

2 hours ago, Benjamin McGuire said:

I grew up in one of those small rural communities in which everyone knows everyone. The kinds of discussions that occur are about the weather, the farm, the new house being built down the road. They aren't about obscure books published on a different continent.

I'd argue that The Star in the East was discussed in academic circles in small town Hanover. There's data to support it. If you want to rib me about my ideas, this is the text you must rib me about. More than Humboldt. More than Kircher. More than John Smith. The Star in the East provided the foundation for not only the Book of Mormon narrative, but also the narrative for the Karen gold book. 

2 hours ago, Benjamin McGuire said:

Do you think that this sequence of implausible events is more likely than the possibility that Joseph Smith simply made it up? I certainly don't think so. This is the problem of coincidence. How do your arguments create a likelihood that exceeds the likelihood of coincidence? Your anecdotal assertions don't do the job.

If you're talking about the sequence of implausible events that you attribute to me above, of course not. My sequence of events is much simpler. Somewhere between Hanover and Palmyra, Joseph Smith is introduced to the narrative of brass plates and Israelite migrations to 65 colonies between Yemen and China, as Buchanan describes in The Star in the East. This comes either directly, or indirectly, from Buchanan's sermon. Smith has 7 years to understand the narrative through discussions with Moroni and anyone else he might ask. In 1828, eager to translate the book written on gold plates given to him by Moroni, he sends Martin off to New York to find someone to support, and ultimately publish, his translation. He finds that support in Mitchill. Smith translates the gold plates and publishes the Book of Mormon

Edited April 23, 2024 by Zosimus

[ZealouslyStriving]

17 minutes ago, Zosimus said:

Smith has 7 years to understand the narrative through discussions with Moroni and anyone else he might ask.

Let me see if I get your gist...

You believe "A Star in the East" was used by the Lord as material to prepare Joseph's mind to understand what he would be seeing through the Urim & Thummim (I'm one of those crazies that doesn't vibe with the stone in the hat narrative) as he translated/interpreted?

If so, I don't have a huge issue with that.

[Zosimus]

35 minutes ago, ZealouslyStriving said:

You believe "A Star in the East" was used by the Lord as material to prepare Joseph's mind to understand what he would be seeing through the Urim & Thummim (I'm one of those crazies that doesn't vibe with the stone in the hat narrative) as he translated/interpreted?

Precisely, it was in fact a sermon, intended to turn the hearts of American Christians abroad. It did just that. Adoniram Judson attributes his reading of this sermon as the event that compelled him to India and Burma. He was not the only one. Levi Spaulding, who Behrens identifies as a relative of Solomon Spaulding (although I cannot verify this) was at Dartmouth while Hyrum was at Moors, was also one of these early missionaries to India. Buchanan is given a prominent mention during Spaulding's mission farewell in the Salem Tabernacle. (source)

The Star in the East was the spark that led to a wave of missionary fervor in the 1810s/1820s and also, IMO, was key to the restoration of the gospel through Joseph Smith. This is from the book I linked to above:

You can see the effect it had in the list of ABCFM missions that were opened around the world, including missions to the Native Americans:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Board_of_Commissioners_for_Foreign_Missions

Edited April 23, 2024 by Zosimus

[Benjamin McGuire]

1 hour ago, Zosimus said:

I provided links to Humbodlt, and a publication that seems to draw heavily from Mitchill.

But Humboldt isn't an American.

1 hour ago, Zosimus said:

I also referenced Buchanan's The Star in the East which references Kircher

And Buchanan isn't an American. And while his Star in the East is published in America (in many editions), the mention of Kircher is in an appendix (which wasn't published in some of the earlier editions) in a footnote, which reads:

Quote

John Barrow, Esq. Secretary to Lord Macartney's Embassy. See his Travels in China, page 616. Mr. Barrow is the only writer from Kircher downwards, who has illustrated China.

This sort of thing doesn't instill confidence in your claims that Kircher was something of a household name in the United States in the early 19th century. I'll grant you that this is a mention. But it tells us nothing of Kircher or his theories ...

1 hour ago, Zosimus said:

How is this any different from what you might be doing? Don't you relate the Book of Mormon to some real historical context? Are you not supporting this view by referencing the fictional Book of Esther? Have I misunderstood your views? Maybe it'd help if you just came right out and said whether or not you believe the Book of Mormon is a historical account of Israelites in America or a book of fictional scripture, like Esther.

What am I doing?

No, I don't relate the Book of Mormon to some real historical context - other than the part that indicates for itself that it relates to a specific place and time (Jerusalem, some time before its destruction around 587 BCE). For us to understand the text of the Book of Mormon, I don't think that we need to place it into a historical context. If we believe that it can only be understood properly when placed in the correct historical context (the correct time and place) then it seems clear that no one can actually understand it properly ... I don't take this position (either the first part of it or the conclusion drawn from it). I don't think that the narrative in the Book of Mormon suggests this necessity either - and this for two reasons. First because it tells us that original context can be irrelevant (see what Nephi does with Isaiah) and second because it really makes little conscious effort to try and place itself in a context that we can understand.

I don't think that there is much similarity between the Book of Mormon and Esther because with the Book of Esther we have an ancient fiction while the Book of Mormon is clearly a modern text (either as a translation or as an original work). With the Book of Esther, we know it is fiction because we know that the historical context in which it is written is inconsistent with the narrative provided by the text. This is related to another fundamental problem of what you do (that we have discussed elsewhere). If we assume that the Book of Mormon is a translation of an ancient text, to try and use the Book of Mormon as a source for that ancient context we first have to distinguish between material that is attributable to the modern translation, and what might be assigned to the unknown urtext. To make this like the Book of Esther, we would then need to be able to assess the historical context in which the text was written, and show that while the Book of Mormon fits that context well in terms of language and content, that the narrative itself is fictional because the people involved couldn't possible have existed (even though the story could otherwise be quite plausible). Esther is useful for illustrating the difference between versimilitude and historicity. With the Book of Mormon we cannot assess either verisimilitude or historicity (outside of the first parts of the text where we can place the narrative with some certainty into a context). This is a pretty big difference.

There is a fascinating subtext, which of course LDS members have engaged for years. The idea that if they can argue for verisimilitude then they can argue for historicity through that verisimilitude - because for them, they see an inconsistency with the idea of a revealed text from God being itself nothing more than a work of historical fiction (like Esther). This is at least in part the reason for the drive to try and connect the text to various historical contexts. I am personally completely indifferent to this effort. I don't think that it provides us with anything terribly useful - and the risk of reading the text through such a context is that in mistaking the context, we provide for poor readings.

2 hours ago, Zosimus said:

I'm not convinced the Spaulding manuscript hypothesis provides the best explanation. That's why I hadn't mentioned Spaulding at all over the last few weeks of back and forth. I believe Joseph Smith to be the author/translator, and my hypothesis is that his interpretations were influenced by his environment, from Hanover to Palmyra. But the most important environmental influence came through Martin Harris' trip to New York, and his discussions with whatever learned person he might find in the months previous to the commencement of the translation, including those we know of: Samuel Mitchell, Luther Bradish and Charles Anthon. These discussions with scholars were more important than Dartmouth IMO.

But we don't have any evidence that these "discussions" conveyed anything meaningful, or that they were more than superficial discussions. The timing is also problematic. The 1828 trip occurs after the Book of Mormon translation work has begun. In any case, you provide nothing but speculation - and this speculation doesn't provide us with any sort of reason to start looking for parallels in any of the places you are looking. It just isn't there until you start producing imaginary content for those discussions.

2 hours ago, Zosimus said:

Its something like 400 pages long. Let's read it before we comment on it.

Why? It's a serious question. It wouldn't seem to have any relevance to any of these issues. As I pointed out, it is a fallback for a theory that has consistently proven wrong - and when it is proven wrong, the fallback isn't to something that seems likely but to something that has a small chance of being possible (there's that argument for plausibility being used by those trying to continue a failed argument). It's been a long time since Dale and I had our arguments - but things haven't changed much since then.

2 hours ago, Zosimus said:

I'd argue that The Star in the East was discussed in academic circles in small town Hanover.

Ok. But The Star of the East doesn't engage Kircher. So I have to ask why it is relevant here ...

2 hours ago, Zosimus said:

There's data to support it. If you want to rib me about my ideas, this is the text you must rib me about. More than Humboldt. More than Kircher. More than John Smith. The Star in the East provided the foundation for not only the Book of Mormon narrative, but also the narrative for the Karen gold book.

There's no data to support this. And in fact The Star of the East provides virtually no foundation for the narrative of The Book of Mormon. As I have noted, one of the characteristics of parallelomania is to take two texts and to reduce them to over-generalizations and then to pretend that those generalizations are the core material of the texts. Once you have that core, you then claim that the core of the two texts are the same. In fact, The Book of Mormon and The Star of the East share very little. It does not provide a foundation.

2 hours ago, Zosimus said:

If you're talking about the sequence of implausible events that you attribute to me above, of course not. My sequence of events is much simpler. Somewhere between Hanover and Palmyra, Joseph Smith is introduced to the narrative of brass plates and Israelite migrations to 65 colonies between Yemen and China, as Buchanan describes in The Star in the East. This comes either directly, or indirectly, from Buchanan's sermon. Smith has 7 years to understand the narrative through discussions with Moroni and anyone else he might ask. In 1828, eager to translate the book written on gold plates given to him by Moroni, he sends Martin off to New York to find someone to support, and ultimately publish, his translation. He finds that support in Mitchill. Smith translates the gold plates and publishes the Book of Mormon

And it's all in your head.

[Zosimus]

13 hours ago, Benjamin McGuire said:

But Humboldt isn't an American.

He is not, but he was one of the first to explore the Americas, and more importantly, his book was one of the first to discuss the 'hieroglyphs' of South America. In his discussion of American hieroglyphs, he references Kircher's Oedipus Aegyptiacus and Obeliscus Pamphilius. Although it was not published in America before 1830 afaik, Humboldt knew numerous American distributors and had a wide distribution among booksellers within the United States.

13 hours ago, Benjamin McGuire said:

And Buchanan isn't an American.

That's right. But this is moving the goalpost. Your claim was that Kircher was not mentioned in American publications before 1850. Buchanan's sermon was widely published and distributed throughout New England during the time that Hyrum was at Moors in the 1810s.

13 hours ago, Benjamin McGuire said:

This sort of thing doesn't instill confidence in your claims that Kircher was something of a household name in the United States in the early 19th century. I'll grant you that this is a mention. But it tells us nothing of Kircher or his theories ...

I never claimed Kircher was "something of a household name in the United States in the early 19th century." I'd said it'd be unlikely that John Smith wouldn't have known about Kircher. You then claimed that Kircher wasn't mentioned in American publication before 1850. I asked for a CFR to support your claim. But instead of acknowledging your misstatement you move the goalpost to something like "Kircher was not a household name in the United States in the 19th century". So let's put the goalpost back. There were a number of American publications that mentioned Kircher before 1850. Claudius Buchanan mentioned Kircher in 1809. The works of Buchanan were in the Dartmouth Library at least as early as 1825. I don't need to demonstrate that Hyrum or John Smith knew of Kircher, because I don't agree with the hypothesis that John Smith wrote a book about Kircher's Nephi. There's no evidence to support that. There's also no evidence to support the hypothesis that there are 'kircherisms' in the Book of Mormon. I don't see any.

My interest in Kircher is not Nephi, or his magnetic compass. My interest is his theory that Egyptians had been exiled in the 6th century BC and established Egyptian colonies across India and China. Kircher argued that Chinese hieroglyphs had Egyptian origins. This idea was later extended to American hieroglyphs by Humboldt and Rafinesque. This is why I linked to Humboldt's discussion of American hieroglyphs in his text that references Kircher's Oedipus Aegyptiacus and Obeliscus Pamphilius.

13 hours ago, Benjamin McGuire said:

But we don't have any evidence that these "discussions" conveyed anything meaningful, or that they were more than superficial discussions. The timing is also problematic. The 1828 trip occurs after the Book of Mormon translation work has begun. In any case, you provide nothing but speculation - and this speculation doesn't provide us with any sort of reason to start looking for parallels in any of the places you are looking. It just isn't there until you start producing imaginary content for those discussions.

The reason Martin Harris had discussions with these scholars was to ask if they could give him some confirmation that the characters on the transcript somehow corroborated the gold plate narrative. Samuel Mitchel made a "learned dissertation" on the characters. Mitchill compared the charactors with hieroglyphs and put them down as a script from a nation now extinct, which he named. In my mind a learned dissertation is not a superficial discussion. Mitchill and Harris were not discussing the weather.

If James Gordon Bennett's notes are accurate, then Mitchill did convey something meaningful to Harris, confirmation from America's leading naturalist that the characters on the plates were authentic and the nation that produced them was historical. The timing is not problematic. It was right at the time the translation began. Mitchill's assessment of the characters was enough for Harris to return and support the translation of the gold plates. This is not my speculation, it is the conclusion of Richard Bennett, a historian. (source)

13 hours ago, Benjamin McGuire said:

Why? It's a serious question. It wouldn't seem to have any relevance to any of these issues. As I pointed out, it is a fallback for a theory that has consistently proven wrong - and when it is proven wrong, the fallback isn't to something that seems likely but to something that has a small chance of being possible (there's that argument for plausibility being used by those trying to continue a failed argument). It's been a long time since Dale and I had our arguments - but things haven't changed much since then.

I'm not much of a Spaulding theorist. I believe Joseph Smith was the author/translator. But there are other channels whereby the ideas within a Spaulding manuscript could have reached the Smiths. Solomon had family in Sharon. I mentioned above that Behrens identified Levi Spaulding, a student at Dartmouth, as a relative of Solomon. Levi also had two brothers at Dartmouth. There is at least one account from a Wayne County resident that a nephew of Spaulding had a Spaulding manuscript that had been known to Joseph Smith. But again, I'm not convinced the Book of Mormon came from a Spaulding manuscript, or a Kircher manuscript or a John Smith manuscript. These authorship theories aren't necessary. Joseph Smith had access to everything he needed to translate the gold plates in 1828. 

13 hours ago, Benjamin McGuire said:

Ok. But The Star of the East doesn't engage Kircher. So I have to ask why it is relevant here ...

Because the 1809 sermon was published and distributed widely across New England, and it mentions Kircher. It appears that it was also in the Dartmouth Library. It is relevant here because you'd said there was no mention of Kircher in American publications before 1850. I am pointing out that this is incorrect.

13 hours ago, Benjamin McGuire said:

There's no data to support this. And in fact The Star of the East provides virtually no foundation for the narrative of The Book of Mormon. As I have noted, one of the characteristics of parallelomania is to take two texts and to reduce them to over-generalizations and then to pretend that those generalizations are the core material of the texts. Once you have that core, you then claim that the core of the two texts are the same. In fact, The Book of Mormon and The Star of the East share very little. It does not provide a foundation.

Here's how The Star in the East provided the foundation for the Karen gold book narrative:

"American Baptist missionaries point to a single book to explain the history of their foreign missions, a history that began in Burma but spread all over the world. The book they say launched their thousand ships was, of course, the Bible—specifically, the command in the Gospels to “go ye into all the world, and preach the gospel to every creature.” This Christian injunction to proselytize in foreign lands gave textual authority to American Protestant campaigns establishing mission stations abroad. But an examination of the earliest American Baptist missionary records reveals that the Bible was not the only book that sent evangelists east; there was another book, and it, too, told of the life and teachings of Christ, but these sacred messages were said to have been buried under centuries of heathen darkness and superstition. This other book was an imagined ancient Indian manuscript.

The fantastical idea of an ancient Christian Indian scripture was first circulated to America in 1809, when the sermon “The Star in the East” by Claudius Buchanan became popular reading in Protestant circles...The romanticized history that lured Adoniram to India bears a striking resemblance to fantasies of past times nurtured not only among the Karen communities examined in the previous section but also among the Burmese Buddhists ... What sent the Judsons on their journey were not straightforward progress reports, but sensational stories of prophets speaking Indian tongues who discovered keys to the kingdom of God." (source)

Buchanan's accounts of Indian Jews with mysterious Biblical texts - like this one acquired by Buchanan and discussed in a journal that you review - did provide the foundation for a missionary movement that was centered within miles of Joseph Smith Sr's birthplace of Topsfield and John Smith's hometown of Byfield. These missionaries, inspired by The Star in the East, nurtured an indigenous Christian movement based on a recovered gold book. Having interviewed the villagers at the center of the Karen gold book narrative, I don't believe the Karen gold book is related to the gold plates. But there's no way to reach a conclusion as the text is known only to those that have learned the revealed script. Given the timing and the proximity of these missionaries to the Smith family, I do feel its worth discussing how The Star in the East might have also influenced the Book of Mormon translation and early Mormon mission efforts. If you aren't interested in the discussion, that's OK. But telling me three or four times a day that its "not interesting" isn't going to change my mind about anything. To do that you'd have to convince me that Buchanan's sermon wasn't being discussed in Essex County MA and that it could not have had a spiritual impact on students (like Levi Spaulding) at Dartmouth in the 1810s. 

Edited April 24, 2024 by Zosimus

[Kenngo1969]

On 4/22/2024 at 7:46 AM, Benjamin McGuire said:

... Mitchill almost certainly had never heard of the book until he was asked to provide the promotional text (it wasn't a forward) [sic] and [he] was probably paid for it. ...

 

As Festus Doofus, Ph.D., the noted Professor of English at the University of Southern Nowhar, put it, "Foreword, forward!  Oh, them near-homophones!  They's tricky thangs!"     (Come to think of it, maybe your Auto Complete or Auto Correct or Voice to Text function has betrayed you here.  I hate it when that happens! ) 

[Benjamin McGuire]

6 hours ago, Zosimus said:

He is not, but he was one of the first to explore the Americas, and more importantly, his book was one of the first to discuss the 'hieroglyphs' of South America. In his discussion of American hieroglyphs, he references Kircher's Oedipus Aegyptiacus and Obeliscus Pamphilius. Although it was not published in America before 1830 afaik, Humboldt knew numerous American distributors and had a wide distribution among booksellers within the United States.

All of this is a sort of irrelevant trivia. The idea that he was one of the first to explore the Americas isn't really accurate. He doesn't arrive (for the first time) in New Spain (Mexico) until 1803. The idea that he was one of the first to discuss the 'hieroglyphs' of South America is laughable. The first systematic approach to South American hieroglyphs was the work of Diego de Landa, who produced his work in the mid-1500s. Of course, the reason why this doesn't come up in your search for evidence for your theory is that his work and the work of later Spanish students (like Francisco Ximénez and his work with the Popol Vuh) was largely unavailable to Europeans.

6 hours ago, Zosimus said:

That's right. But this is moving the goalpost. Your claim was that Kircher was not mentioned in American publications before 1850. Buchanan's sermon was widely published and distributed throughout New England during the time that Hyrum was at Moors in the 1810s.

I agree with you. So I have to change the goalpost. Kircher wasn't widely discussed in American publications before 1850. The reference to Kircher, in a footnote in an appendix is not going to create broad knowledge. As part of the appendix, it means it's likely that Buchanan didn't use Kircher in his sermon(s). The footnote also suggests that Buchanan was referring specifically to Kircher's work China Illustrata.

6 hours ago, Zosimus said:

I never claimed Kircher was "something of a household name in the United States in the early 19th century." I'd said it'd be unlikely that John Smith wouldn't have known about Kircher.

So let's continue this moving of the goal posts. I think that it's quite possible that John Smith would have heard the name Kircher. What does this mean? The reason why John Smith is of interest is because of the Spaulding theory, right? Both Spaulding and Ethan Smith both went to Dartmouth while John Smith was teaching there, and could have been taught by him (that is, whatever relevant information we might get from Kircher would have been passed to Spaulding or Ethan Smith, who then used it when possibly writing the Book of Mormon). But the idea that John Smith knew of Kircher is a far cry from whether or not John Smith taught anything that Kircher wrote (or had even read anything by Kircher). We get this string of suppositions with absolutely no evidence.

Neither Spaulding or Ethan Smith ever mention Kircher in any surviving texts.

6 hours ago, Zosimus said:

My interest in Kircher is not Nephi, or his magnetic compass. My interest is his theory that Egyptians had been exiled in the 6th century BC and established Egyptian colonies across India and China. Kircher argued that Chinese hieroglyphs had Egyptian origins. This idea was later extended to American hieroglyphs by Humboldt and Rafinesque. This is why I linked to Humboldt's discussion of American hieroglyphs in his text that references Kircher's Oedipus Aegyptiacus and Obeliscus Pamphilius.

So we come back to a couple of key points.

No matter what else we might think of Kircher and his work or Humboldt and his work, Egyptian was not the source of Chinese Hieroglyphs. This can be easily established. We know of Chinese writing much, much older than the time-frame that Kircher proposes. Kircher's assumptions about language traveling from Egypt to China is framed by his understanding of the world wide flood and Noah. I'll use his China Illustrata because it's description is pretty straight forward (This is from the beginning of Part VI, Chapter I):

Quote

We are not speaking here of letters or signs which constitute an alphabet, but of significative characters which show an entire concept in a single character… we read in the Chinese annals that they began to write about 300 years after the flood. The inventor and king at that time was named Fohi… I can scarcely doubt that he learned this from the sons of Noah. In the first book of my Oedipus it is told how Cham first came from Egypt to Persia and then planted colonies in Bactria. We understand that he was the same as Zoroaster, the king of the Bactrians. Bactria is the farthest kingdom of the Persians and it borders on the Mogor or Indian empire. It is opportunely situated for the colonization of China, which was the last place on earth to be colonized. At the same time the elements of writing were instituted by Father Cham and Mercury Trismegistos, the son of Nasraimus. Although they learned them imperfectly, they were able to carry them to China. The old Chinese characters are a very strong argument for this, for they completely imitate the hieroglyphic writings. First, the Chinese constructed the characters from things of the world. Then the chronicles teach, and the form of the characters amply demonstrate, that like the Egyptians they formed their writing from pictures of animals, birds, reptiles, fishes, herbs, branches of trees, ropes, threads, points, then later developed a more abbreviated system, which they use right down to the present date.

This quote comes from this text here - Chapter 8 is about Kircher. Kircher's theory isn't about a 6th century group of Egyptian exiles that colonize what is now China. His theory spelled out in several places is that this occurs within a few hundred years of the flood, and that the colonization was begun by Ham, the son of Noah. There is no 6th century group that is exiled in Kircher's writings.

Now, not only does this not compare with the Book of Mormon, but, the Book of Mormon, as part of the Jaredite narrative, completely contradicts the core of Kircher's beliefs about the colonization of the world following the flood and the relationship of languages between these groups. The Jaredites maintain their original language (that original language that Kircher likes) because they escaped the confusion of languages at Babel.

The more I read, the more problematic the arguments you raise become - because of the issues that I point out - you create the similarities as much through interpretation as anything else.

Then there is the meta-discussion. Kircher's theories were wrong. The reason why he is a completely obscure figure today is that despite his being the first person to create a grammar for Egyptian hieroglyphics, it didn't work. Kircher's ideas about language, population immigration, and all of this are a fiction he developed. Let's assume for a moment that you are right - that Kircher, and later Humboldt and Rafinesque were all influences on the text of the Book of Mormon. Then we come to the conclusion that the Book of Mormon is a fiction. And if the Book of Mormon is a fiction, then it cannot be a real history of some group in eastern Asia. It leaves me questioning what it is that you are really arguing about ...

8 hours ago, Zosimus said:

The reason Martin Harris had discussions with these scholars was to ask if they could give him some confirmation that the characters on the transcript somehow corroborated the gold plate narrative. Samuel Mitchel made a "learned dissertation" on the characters. Mitchill compared the charactors with hieroglyphs and put them down as a script from a nation now extinct, which he named. In my mind a learned dissertation is not a superficial discussion. Mitchill and Harris were not discussing the weather.

As I said, this is all in your head. You don't have any idea what was actually discussed in these 'discussions' because we have so little information about them. So naturally, you interpret them in an expansive way that supports your long sequence of necessary events.

8 hours ago, Zosimus said:

If James Gordon Bennett's notes are accurate, then Mitchill did convey something meaningful to Harris, confirmation from America's leading naturalist that the characters on the plates were authentic and the nation that produced them was historical. The timing is not problematic. It was right at the time the translation began. Mitchill's assessment of the characters was enough for Harris to return and support the translation of the gold plates. This is not my speculation, it is the conclusion of Richard Bennett, a historian. (source)

One of the fascinating things about all of this is that we have James Gordon Bennett's journal entries for August 7 and 8 of 1831. If we go to Richard Bennett's source (here) we get an interesting read. So what does James Gordon Bennett write?

Quote

Mormonism - C. Butler saw Harris they wanted to borrow money to print the Book - he told them he carried the engravings from the plates to New York - showed them to Professor Anthon who said that he did not know what language they were - told him to carry them to Dr. Mitchell - Doctor Mitchell examined them - and compared them with other hieroglyphics - thought them very curious - and they were the characters of a nation now extinct which he named - Harris returned to Anthon who put some questions to him and got angry with Harris

The previous entry is also interesting. I won't duplicate it here - you can look it up, but in it we read that Sidney Rigdon was the author of the Gold Plates, that they dug a hole 30 feet deep and 6 feet in diameter into the hill to get the plates, the chest they were in "fled his approach," and even (referring to the lost manuscript I think) that "Smiths wife looked into a hole and the chest fled into a trunk and he lost several of them."

While I believe that these are the things that James Bennett was told, they aren't necessarily accurate remembrances. It seems strange to me that Butler (assuming that Butler is the source) knows that Mitchell identifies the script with  specific extinct race - and yet no one knows which race that was. Richard Bennett's conclusions aren't nearly what you make them out to be:

Quote

His assertion that the characters thereon were “of a nation now extinct which he named” speaks directly to his own richly developed theories on the extinct Australasian race of ancient America, that “delicate race” destroyed by the Tartars ultimately somewhere in upstate New York not far from where Harris farmed near Palmyra. Is it any wonder that Harris returned to Palmyra confirmed and committed to assisting in the work of translating the Book of Mormon?

In other words, Mitchell's response to Harris was self-serving. It's clear that Mitchell had a population from Malaysia (or Australia) that came first, and was later destroyed by Mongols coming across the Bering Strait. And we can see how this would have seemed convincing to Martin Harris. But it also seems unlikely that this theory changed the trajectory of the Book of Mormon. The Book of Mormon seems pretty set on the Nephites and Lamanites being Israelites - which wasn't an idea that Mitchell accepted.

It also points to a different issue. There were (as I noted a while back) a lot of different theories behind the native populations in the Americas. Many of these theories insist that the reason why the question needed to be answered was because there was a terminal point for the earliest possible habitation of the Americas - Noah's flood. The question comes out - why, if you want to base the Book of Mormon on some fictitious history, do we need to go to this one, which seems much more problematic than some of the other theories? I would say that it has little to do with which source is better, and a lot to do with the question of availability of sources. Here you engage these discussions about Mithill but they are easy to find because of the interest in verifying Martin Harris's claims. The Spaulding theory provides all sorts of information about Dartmouth - but the Spaulding theory originally comes out of untenable claims of authorship of the Book of Mormon. It is easy to find because of the digital footprint. But without these earlier suspect claims, these sources wouldn't be being discussed at all.

[Zosimus]

14 hours ago, Benjamin McGuire said:

All of this is a sort of irrelevant trivia. The idea that he was one of the first to explore the Americas isn't really accurate. He doesn't arrive (for the first time) in New Spain (Mexico) until 1803. The idea that he was one of the first to discuss the 'hieroglyphs' of South America is laughable. The first systematic approach to South American hieroglyphs was the work of Diego de Landa, who produced his work in the mid-1500s. 

It is trivia, because we've already established that Kircher was mentioned in American publications before 1850. I included Humboldt in the list because he had American distributors and was so widely read. In Joseph Smith's time, Humboldt was known as the second Columbus because most of the knowledge collected on America before Humboldt was inaccessible (source). Was Diego de Landa even available in English in 1830? 

14 hours ago, Benjamin McGuire said:

I agree with you. So I have to change the goalpost. Kircher wasn't widely discussed in American publications before 1850. The reference to Kircher, in a footnote in an appendix is not going to create broad knowledge. As part of the appendix, it means it's likely that Buchanan didn't use Kircher in his sermon(s). The footnote also suggests that Buchanan was referring specifically to Kircher's work China Illustrata.

My point is Buchanan was familiar with China Illustrata. Since he references it, I'd assume he either read it or was familiar with it. My sense is that Kircher's China Illustrata supported Buchanan's own ideas about ancient cryptic Indian texts containing spiritual truths waiting to be translated. It was a widespread idea amongst orientalists of the time. This is a good read.

14 hours ago, Benjamin McGuire said:

So let's continue this moving of the goal posts. I think that it's quite possible that John Smith would have heard the name Kircher. What does this mean? The reason why John Smith is of interest is because of the Spaulding theory, right? Both Spaulding and Ethan Smith both went to Dartmouth while John Smith was teaching there, and could have been taught by him (that is, whatever relevant information we might get from Kircher would have been passed to Spaulding or Ethan Smith, who then used it when possibly writing the Book of Mormon). But the idea that John Smith knew of Kircher is a far cry from whether or not John Smith taught anything that Kircher wrote (or had even read anything by Kircher). We get this string of suppositions with absolutely no evidence.

Neither Spaulding or Ethan Smith ever mention Kircher in any surviving texts.

Again, I believe Joseph Smith had everything needed to complete the translation of the gold plates without having to depend on a Spaulding manuscript. What Dartmouth demonstrates is just how early these narratives were in circulation around the Smiths. If both Spaulding and Ethan Smith go on to write books about the peopling of the Americas, we shouldn't be terribly surprised that a text like the Book of Mormon is published in 1830. Manuscript Found, View of the Hebrews and the Book of Mormon come from the same environment. That doesn't mean they were all written by Dr. John Smith.

14 hours ago, Benjamin McGuire said:

This quote comes from this text here - Chapter 8 is about Kircher. Kircher's theory isn't about a 6th century group of Egyptian exiles that colonize what is now China. His theory spelled out in several places is that this occurs within a few hundred years of the flood, and that the colonization was begun by Ham, the son of Noah. There is no 6th century group that is exiled in Kircher's writings.

Yes, that theory is spelled out in several places...that weren't easily accessible (as you note) to people like Humboldt or Buchanan. To understand what Humboldt or Buchanan might have known about Kircher's ideas, you'd have to read the texts that they reference. For example, Buchanan references China Illustrata. From the text:

"The Chinese books say that there are three sects in the world, as they call their kingdoms and the neighboring ones, since they know very little about the other places. The first sect is that of literati. The second is the Sciequia. The third is called Lancu. All the Chinese and their neighbors who use Chinese characters for writing-follow one of these. This is true of the peoples of Japan, Korea, Tonchin, and the Cochin China, of whom we shall talk later. These three sects correspond in nearly all respects to the three social classes who composed the ancient Egyptian kingdom, that is, the priests, those who knew the hieroglyphic writing, and the common people."

14 hours ago, Benjamin McGuire said:

There is no 6th century group that is exiled in Kircher's writings.

Again, you'd have to read the book:

"It is established by Herodotus, Pliny, Diodorus, Pausanias, Plutarch, and the other historians that after the invasion of Egypt by Cambyses, the king of the Persians (which happened when Numa Pompilius was the second king of Rome) nearly all the wisdom of the Egyptians, which was already more than a thousand years old, perished in final ruin with the empire on the Nile. The statues of the gods were pounded into dust. The great obelisks were overthrown. Apis, the greatest Egyptian god, a sacred bull who was cared for in a certain enclosure, was killed by Cambyses himself. The whole crowd of priests and hieromants was cut to pieces or destroyed in the same fire that ruined their hieroglyphic monuments, or they were driven into exile. Since the land routes were filled with bands of the enemy who would not allow them safe passage, they finally made their way along the Arabian Gulf, which borders on Egypt, and so they reached India, today called Hundustan. There they found monuments from old civilizations, and discovered that Hermes, Bacchus, and Osiris had proceeded them there. Here in this far corner of the world, they again taught and renewed the worship of the gods abolished in Egypt by Cambyses, as has already been more than adequately shown....This preposterous superstition is found not only in the regions of India far and wide, but was also propagated in Cambodia, Tonchin, Laos, Concin China, as well as all of China and Japan. It has brought along its fanatic crowd of innumerable gods and goddesses. Now we will investigate a little more fully the introduction of this superstition into the farthest Orient."

According to Kircher, there were 6th century BC migrations of exiled Egyptians/Ethiopians following the invasion of Cambyses. They entered India and Southeast Asia and found the ruins of other worshippers of Hermes, Bacchus and Osiris had already been established there. They "renewed" the worship of those gods in India, and into the farthest orient.

Fun fact, or irrelevant trivia: Cambodia, which takes its name from the Iranian Kambojas, is coincidentally etymologically related to Cambyses. (source)

14 hours ago, Benjamin McGuire said:

Now, not only does this not compare with the Book of Mormon, but, the Book of Mormon, as part of the Jaredite narrative, completely contradicts the core of Kircher's beliefs about the colonization of the world following the flood and the relationship of languages between these groups. The Jaredites maintain their original language (that original language that Kircher likes) because they escaped the confusion of languages at Babel.

The more I read, the more problematic the arguments you raise become - because of the issues that I point out - you create the similarities as much through interpretation as anything else.

OK but you failed to read Kircher's book and are now basing your conclusion - that my arguments are problematic - based on your misunderstanding of Kircher's ideas. There's not the contradiction that you suggest. Not unlike the Egyptian exiles in the 6th century BC, the exiled Lehites also found the remnants of a previous civilization that had been established following the confusion of languages. The Jaredites had proceeded them there, and upon discovering it, there's a sort of renewal of their civilization.

14 hours ago, Benjamin McGuire said:

Then we come to the conclusion that the Book of Mormon is a fiction. And if the Book of Mormon is a fiction, then it cannot be a real history of some group in eastern Asia. It leaves me questioning what it is that you are really arguing about ...

I've said before, I'm not so interested in the historicity question. It could be a fiction, or a history, or a combination of fiction and history. I dunno. My idea is a simple one. Read the Book of Mormon as if it were a text written on a Biblical isle of the sea. Don't force the gold plates to cross the Pacific ocean to Chile in 600 BC. If we keep it where the authors believed themselves to be, and don't make assumptions about where they were, we remove the burden we have put on the translator of the gold plates to provide correct translations of words like iron and elephants, the question of Book of Mormon historicity becomes no more relevant than the question of the Book of Esther historicity. 

14 hours ago, Benjamin McGuire said:

In other words, Mitchell's response to Harris was self-serving. It's clear that Mitchell had a population from Malaysia (or Australia) that came first, and was later destroyed by Mongols coming across the Bering Strait. And we can see how this would have seemed convincing to Martin Harris. But it also seems unlikely that this theory changed the trajectory of the Book of Mormon. The Book of Mormon seems pretty set on the Nephites and Lamanites being Israelites - which wasn't an idea that Mitchell accepted.

Mitchill didn't subscribe to the lost tribe theories, but he did read and reference Raffles who explains in his History of Java how some scripts of Sumatra and Java resemble Egyptian. Raffles also believed the archipelago was colonized by Egyptians. Raffles also translated the Malay Annals, which Mitchill would have read, which describes the founders of Mallaca coming from Rum, or the Meditarranean. As we've discussed elsewhere, the same goes for Maroni in the neighboring Kedah Annals, although this wasn't translated into English until after the publication of the Book of Mormon. All these early orientalists also imagined, like Josephus and Columbus, that China and Cochin China were the Biblical Ophir. Kircher also believed, as he explains in China Illustrata, that Malay archipelago and the Golden Peninsula as he calls it, was the Biblical Ophir:

"I find some controversy among the interpreters as to where Ophir was located. I know some who have considered Ophir the name for golden rice, but this opinion has long since been discredited. Others designate as Ophir that region of America which people commonly call Peru...However, I don’t see how a ship would go from Palestine to the other side of the world, since the lands are not joined and the sphere of the world was unknown to men at that time. Also, they had no magnet or other aids which helped our sailors to discover the world. Yet, these ancients are said to have been able to reach America safely and in very little time. Moreover, why would they seek gold, gems, and precious woods in such distant regions with so much peril when nearer regions such as the Chersonese and Ethiopia abound in gold? This doesn’t make sense, and I think the theory is illogical and ought to be rejected. One might more safely understand Ophir as a Coptic or Egyptian word which the old Egyptians used to refer to India, including the kingdoms of Malabar, Ceylon, the golden Chersonese, and the neighboring islands of Sumatra, the Moluccas, and Java, which abound in gold. We read that Hiram sent Solomon’s fleet at certain times to these regions not only to get gold, gems, stones, and precious woods, but also for peacocks, monkeys, and similar things in which these regions abound. It is abundantly clear that the fleet of Hiram came back from these regions filled with these things. Therefore, since there were frequent expeditions from the Red Sea to Ophir or India, not only the preachers of Christianity made use of this, but also the old Egyptians and their old prophets and philosophers, had commerce back and forth with those regions. Various Egyptian monuments are found there. Ormus or Hormus, the greatest city of the Persian Gulf, was the first colony of the Egyptians in Persia and useful to those people who wanted to cross over into India. The station was built by the Egyptian Hermes, and it is named after him, for Hormoz is the Arabic name of the Greek Hermes (or Mercury). So says Haython in Chapter Six of his book On the Tartars." - China Illustrata

Kircher's ideas were popular with many early orientalists well into the 19th century. Mitchill, who had certainly read Raffles Malay Annals and History of Java, could very easily have made the same mistake and concluded that the Malays and Tartars that fought a great battle of extinction in Onondaga County NY were originally from Egypt and the Mediterranean and had cultural ties to Ethiopia, Persia, and Judea. So here's the important question, what nation did Samuel Mitchill have in mind when he made his learned dissertation on the transcript? To answer that, we'd have to really understand what was known to Mitchill about the Australasians and Polynesians in the 1810s. Surprisingly, Kircher's China Illustrata was still the go-to source of information about China as the Jesuits had been kicked out of Japan, China and Cochin China, and there was no new information coming out of Asia. This is why Claudius Buchanan, who was no stranger to Asia, was still referencing Kircher in 1809 as the earliest source for information about China in his footnotes to The Star in the East. Both Humboldt and Buchanan were referencing Kircher in the 1810s. Samuel "Walking Encyclopedic Chaos of Knowledge" Mitchill would have also been familiar with Kircher's texts. What does this mean? It means, Mitchill very well could have read the translations of hieroglyphs attributed to an Egyptian Jew named Nephi. The unknown is, did he know Nephi? 

First let's establish whether or not Barrachius Nephi was a real person, with a real manuscript. From Daniel Stolzenberg:

"By and large, the image of Abenephius’s treatise that emerges from Kircher’s quotations is consistent with authentic Arabic literature on similar topics. If Kircher invented the treatise, he must have used genuine Arabic sources as his model, which would raise the question: Why attribute the material to a fictitious Arabic source rather than to real ones? Perhaps the name Barachias Nephi, or Abenephius, belonged to an obscure compiler and found its way onto a manuscript of works by another author or authors. Kircher may well have altered or fabricated some of the quotations that he attributed to Abenephius for the convenience of his argument...But the most likely interpretation of the totality of the evidence is that he possessed a genuine manuscript, probably some kind of compendium of Arabic material related to ancient Egypt and hieroglyphic writing."

So yes, Stolzenberg concludes that Kircher did have a Nephi manuscript, or rather that he was using genuine Arabic sources, and Nephi very well could have been a historical compiler of Hebrew/Coptic/Egyptian texts. Now, like I said, I don't believe this has anything to do with our gold plates Nephi, but it does open the possibility of an Egyptian Jew/Arab compiler of texts named Nephi, someone who would have known Hebrew and Egyptian and Arabic.

Now is it possible to establish whether or not Nephi was known to anyone outside of the tight Republic of Letters that Kircher and Peiresc moved within? It's too much wall of text to paste here, but the text is on sale now on Kindle. He's got almost an entire chapter dedicated to references to Nephi after Kircher. It's worth the $0.75

Stolzenberg, Daniel. Egyptian Oedipus: Athanasius Kircher and the Secrets of Antiquity (p. 251). The University of Chicago Press. Kindle Edition. 

Edited April 25, 2024 by Zosimus