webbles Posted January 18, 2025 Posted January 18, 2025 21 minutes ago, JarMan said: It is obvious. Very obvious. After all, Foxe didn't use the word stake in every account. And the classical elements are there in the Book of Mormon story as I've already mentioned. We have 1) a heretic, 2) who's bound, 3) burned, 4) using fagots, 5) after declining the chance to recant, 6) who gives a speech from the flames. Just wanted to point out that Foxe is writing about real humans who really went through burning at the stake. They didn't get together and come up with this script. They, individually, chose to give a speech from the flames. They, individually, chose not to recant. So this means that this is something that humans will really do. So the 6 steps you laid out are normal, natural human things to do. It's like saying that I found a textual match because I have a text that says a 1) a heretic, 2) who's bound 3) suffocated 4) using a cross 5) after declining to recant 6) who gives a speech from the cross. That doesn't mean that no one else did those 6 things. Finding a story with those 6 things doesn't mean it is textual linked, because it could easily happen independently. 2
webbles Posted January 18, 2025 Posted January 18, 2025 7 minutes ago, JarMan said: I think I've read every account in Foxe. Spend some more time reading through them and it will become obvious. All the context clues are there with Abinadi to convincingly tell us what is going on. What will become obvious? That Abinadi was burned at the stake or that Foxe is the source of the story of Abinadi or that Foxe wrote the story or that someone who read Foxe wrote Abinadi or that someone who saw an actual burning wrote Abinadi? I have a hard time believing Foxe wrote Abinadi because the writing style is so different. And I have a hard time believing Foxe is the source of the story because what Abinadi went through is a normal death. Foxe was able to find lots and lots of instances of it. So it is extremely likely that Abinadi would have done similar things. 2
The Nehor Posted January 18, 2025 Posted January 18, 2025 5 hours ago, Calm said: How many people fall while dying? I suspect his wrists and arms were bound to prevent resistance and possibly hobbled but wasn’t secured to anything so he cand then they beat him with firebrands/torches. Then he fell forward as he died. Also possible he was secured to something overhead or was bound over a bench or table and beaten that way and fell forward after his struggles as he died. There are lots of ways to do this. I suspect he was anchored to something. The approach with this kind of torture from what I know of it is to use blunt trauma and then to also hold the brand against the skin. There may have been some doing the beating and others focused on burning. There are a lot of ways to do this and make it a horrifying spectacle. 1
Benjamin McGuire Posted January 18, 2025 Posted January 18, 2025 7 hours ago, JarMan said: The best source for accounts of people being burned at the stake is Foxe's Book of Martyrs, first published in 1563. A lot of similar content appears in the account of Abinadi's death. I've mentioned several of these before, but I'll repeat a few off the top of my head. We have fagots being mentioned in the Book of Mormon. This is an important detail because fagots became the symbol of the process in early modern times. And this word is found all throughout Foxe in describing the executions. Abinadi was also given one last chance to be saved from the flames by simply taking back what had been said. This is very common in Foxe. We also have Abinadi's speech from the flames. This is another common occurrence in Foxe. While many gave short Stephen the Martyr-like remarks, some were predictions of doom on those putting them to death like Abinadi's. We also have "And now, when Abinadi had said these words, he fell, having suffered death by fire..." This implies he was in a standing position and we know that he was bound. The stake here is clearly implied, else why not walk out of the fire? Compare to (from Foxe) "Then immediately bowing forwards, he yielded up his spirit." There's actually very little, if anything, in Abinadi's execution that you can't find in Foxe. There are two things to bring up - we call an entire class of persons martyrs - because their experience shares certain features. Those shared features cannot be used as part of arguments about authorship and textual borrowing - because they are found everywhere. This is the same with talking about digging ditches and building ramparts in warfare - a practice which occurred consistently over thousands of years. Your arguments don't mean as much as you think they do - and if you want to make them mean something, then you need to actually find some sort of recognized method for this sort of thing and engage it so that you are simply practicing parallelomania. But that is just the surface issue here. You bold terms because you think that they are important. But they aren't - it isn't an exact quote. Two words is insufficient in terms of length to give us much (and it isn't identical). But part of it is because your claim involves an entire translation layer. Grotius didn't choose the words "he fell" in your theory - someone else did. So the use of words like this in an alleged translation isn't particularly helpful in trying to show some sort of genetic textual relationship. It simply doesn't work that way. The stake isn't implied at all. And of course, there isn't much in Abinadi's execution that you cannot find in Foxe because, well, Foxe is very graphic - and covers not one or two but dozens of burnings. And when we look more closely at the Foxe account you bring up, we see something different from what you suggest (emphasis added) - Quote The third fire was kindled within a while after, which was more extreme than the other two. In this fire he prayed with a loud voice, Lord Jesus, have mercy upon me! Lord Jesus receive my spirit! And these were the last words he was heard to utter. But when he was black in the mouth, and his tongue so swollen that he could not speak, yet his lips went till they were shrunk to the gums: and he knocked his breast with his hands until one of his arms fell off, and then knocked still with the other, while the fat, water, and blood dropped out at his fingers' ends, until by renewing the fire, his strength was gone, and his hand clave fast in knocking to the iron upon his breast. Then immediately bowing forwards, he yielded up his spirit. This is fascinating because bowing isn't a term that Foxe uses often - and when he does, it is always about an act of worship - consider these two examples: Quote Hearing this, and knowing the fatal obstinacy of the Roman catholics, the protestants all fell prostrate, lifted their hands and hears to heaven, and prayed with great sincerity and fervency, and then bowing down, put their faces close to the ground, and patiently waited their fate ... and Quote During their confinement they behaved with great fortitude and cheerfulness, confessing that the hand of God appeared in what had befallen them, and bowing down before the throne of his providence. The entire implication isn't one of falling (as you suggest), but rather that even as he is dying, the martyr (Bishop Hooper) refuses to stop worshiping God. First with his voice - and when that fails, with his arms - and when those fail, he worships with what is left of his body. So these are not the same thing. And the comparison is clearly superficial. This is apart from pointing out the other obvious thing - even if we can find much of the Abinadi burning in Foxe, the Abinadi narrative would be an extremely abbreviated version. It represents only a fraction of what we see in Foxe - and most of what we have in Foxe isn't in the Book of Mormon. If anything we should accept the idea that the Book of Mormon's portrayal of martyrdom isn't meant to be as overly dramatic as the ones that Foxe presents. And finally, as I keep pointing out, all of this is the reason why, when we make these comparisons, we need to be engaging the differences more than the similarities. 3
Popular Post Benjamin McGuire Posted January 18, 2025 Popular Post Posted January 18, 2025 7 hours ago, JarMan said: My hypothesis needs to be falsified based on the content of the Book of Mormon, not its language. You're argument about the atonement theory, for example, if you were actually right about it would weaken my theory. More on that later, though. If this is true, then you need to focus on content and not language. But you are focusing on language and not content. The Book of Mormon has a tremendous amount of theological content. It's commentary on the Old Testament is extensive. I see very little overlap here with Grotius. It's philosophy of meaning is profound (which I have written about). Where is Grotius's legalistic notion of natural law in the Book of Mormon (this is a subject that Grotius wrote a lot about - he was considered the foremost philosopher on natural law until he was displaced by Kant)? Where is it's take on infant baptism in Grotius? How do we reconcile the Book of Mormon's notion of limited agency with Grotius? How would Grotius view the Book of Mormon's notion that sin is not some sort of absolute but is situational? Grotius and the Book of Mormon both have a lot to say about monarchies and kings - why isn't there any significant overlap? These are all huge red flags for me when we discuss content - but I get the sense that they aren't even on your radar because the way that you look for similarities is through the language and not the content - because you keep coming back with these list of phrases that you think represent equivalencies. You are trying to claim that you are doing one thing but all of the language that you are using represents something else. 7 hours ago, JarMan said: Nephi is describing the Jewish canon in ancient times here: "The book that thou beholdest is a record of the Jews, which contains the covenants of the Lord, which he hath made unto the house of Israel; and it also containeth many of the prophecies of the holy prophets; and it is a record like unto the engravings which are upon the plates of brass, save there are not so many; nevertheless, they contain the covenants of the Lord, which he hath made unto the house of Israel..." This is not the New Testament, obviously. Then he tells us there are many things "taken away" or "kept back" by the great and abominable church, which of course is referring to something within Christianity. The obvious meaning is that the early church left out books, like Enoch for example, when standardizing the canon. Maybe there were gospels or other Christian era books left out, as well. But Nephi's vision isn't telling us the text has been changed. That's not what "taken away" and "kept back" mean. No, Nephi isn't. Let me emphasize a different sort of interpretation - Quote The book that thou beholdest is a record of the Jews, which contains the covenants of the Lord, which he hath made unto the house of Israel; and it also containeth many of the prophecies of the holy prophets; and it is a record like unto the engravings which are upon the plates of brass, save there are not so many; nevertheless, they contain the covenants of the Lord, which he hath made unto the house of Israel... The New Testament is a "record like unto the engravings which are upon the plates of brass, save there are not so many". Naturally, of course, anyone can look at the New Testament and see that it is smaller than the Old Testament, right? And did the first Christians (who were all Jews) receive the covenants of the Lord? Where they considered part of the house of Israel? I think that when you say "obviously" it is in part because you have never really considered the text or its implications. What the angel doesn't say is that the record contains what is in the brass plates (in fact we could argue from the text that the implication is that it specifically doesn't). And the text doesn't say that books were left out. And then we get this: Quote And after they go forth by the hand of the twelve apostles of the Lamb, from the Jews unto the Gentiles, ... And this also cannot be the Old Testament. The fascinating thing about all of this is that the Brass Plates were a copy of the Old Testament translated into Egyptian. This was a record of the Old Testament already aimed at the Gentiles. And what is being said here isn't some historical reality - that the 12 Apostles (Matthew, Mark, Luke, etc.) were taking the Old Testament to the gentiles - they were taking the new message to them - the new gospel, the new covenants. So then what about: Quote for behold, they have taken away from the gospel of the Lamb many parts which are plain and most precious; and also many covenants of the Lord have they taken away. And you suggest that the obvious thing is the books that are left out - like Enoch. But we run into a different sort of problem here. Catholicism still maintains the Apocrypha as part of the canon. True, Enoch is not in there. But that opens an entirely different can of worms, doesn't it. Enoch isn't quoted in the New Testament. Was Enoch something that was taken to the Gentiles by the Twelve Apostles - only to be later removed by the great and abominable church? And then we have the history problem. The Book of Enoch was completely unknown in the 16th and 17th centuries. It was rediscovered in modern times in an Ethiopian text by James Bruce in the late 18th century. It cannot possibly be something that Hugo Grotius was thinking about. And this brings us back full circle. How does this text in the Book of Mormon relate to Hugo Grotius's thought? Is he ever critical in any of his writings about the removal of deutero-canonical materials from the canon? I be interested in you showing me where that is in his writings. Where does Grotius embrace any deutero-canonical work as containing the purity of the gospel? This position you take not only doesn't answer the original concern I raised, it makes it wider. By defining exactly what you think that Nephi is talking about it creates the need for you to show how that meaning is found in Grotius's thought. And then we should take a moment and discuss briefly some of Grotius's influences. Grotius actually published an annotation of the scriptures. This is important to this discussion because it highlights the absence of the issues you raise. Grotius's methods in textual criticism come from Joseph Scaliger. And when we start getting in the text critical works we find an awful lot of material here that - because wasn't as influential as Grotius's works on natural law, didn't get the same widespread distribution. He wrote about the original language of the Gospel of Matthew twice for example (in 1627 and 1641) and determined that it was not originally written in Hebrew, or even in Greek, but in Syriac. And while he occasionally gets into philological discussions, Grotius most frequently engaged in historical contextualization. But, Grotius's annotations is interesting to us within the context of this discussion because he discusses so many passages and their interpretations. Some of these are problematic for the the idea that Grotius wrote the Book of Mormon. Others potentially could be included. After all, Grotius concludes that the Book of Job should be dated to the 5th century BCE (and the Book of Mormon never mentions Job or quotes from it). There is too much to get into, but, I want to provide one quote from Grotius that is really fascinating in the context of this discussion of Nephi and his vision: Quote As times progress, God shows things more openly to his people. So Daniel saw more than Ezekiel; Ezekiel and Jeremiah more than Isaiah ... The destruction of the Roman Empire was revealed to John; that it was revealed to Paul cannot be made likely by any argument. And yet ... what does Nephi see? 8 hours ago, JarMan said: You are dodging the question and trying to use condescension and redirects as a distraction. So I'll ask the question again: how is Nephi's assertion that we should "liken all scriptures unto us, that it might be for our profit and learning" "completely out of place in Grotius"? How do you know he would consider that to be heresy? This is explained in my essay. Nephi claims that he is deliberately preventing his people from understanding the scriptures in the context in which they were originally written. That is, he isn't just providing a new interpretation on top of the old one, he is abandoning the old one. This is out of place in Grotius - and I would challenge you to find anything of this sort in his writings (and there is certainly quite a bit in there about interpreting scripture). There is no condescension here. Really. I am simply suggesting what my observations lead me to conclude. That you are drawing these connections from language not from the ideas that are expressed. If you think that I am wrong, then it should be a simple process for you to start showing what Grotius wrote that shares the ideas expressed in the Book of Mormon - that shares the theology, and the understanding of scripture, and the interpretive models, and so on. Grotius wrote an awful lot - he was incredibly influential for a period of time. Pick one of his titles and we can go through it together (so that we are on the same page). Let's see how his ideas are ignored, shared, or repudiated by the Book of Mormon. 8 hours ago, JarMan said: No, they're not the same features. Yes they are. And there are some in there that you don't highlight as well. digging up heaps of earth - ridges of earth - timbers - works of timbers - frame of pickets - towers - places of security This is compared to this list: rampart - breastwork - double trench - turrets - breastwork of wattles - rampart (again) - doors and higher turrets One of the things I included in the first list - that you didn't include - is the frame of pickets. The picket here means simply pointy sticks arranged with the points at the top (usually vertically). we call these Palisades. The rough equivalent to these in the other text (the Caesar text) is the "breastwork of wattles." These are common features of military forts in pre-industrial conditions. Ditches. Ridges of earth. Timber works. Frames of pickets. Towers. Muy first quick search this morning yielded a description of a siege battle in 1781 in South Carolina during the revolutionary war. Let's see: Quote The 28-day siege centered on an earthen fortification known as Star Fort. ... the defenses consisted of a palisade surrounded by a deep ditch and abatis (felled trees with sharpened branches facing out). A large redoubt called the Star Fort provided a place for defenders to enfilade attackers on two of the stockade walls, and a smaller redoubt provided similar cover for the remaining walls and the water supply. ... At first, the crack snipers in the tower were able to pick off a number of Cruger's artillerymen. ... Let's see - even in this brief discussion, I have the rampart, the brestwork of wattles, the trenches, the doors, and so on. As I said, these are common military features in pre-industrial warfare. You don't really get any mileage by comparing them. And we can see these same features in the Book of Mormon - the frame of pickets = the abatis = the breastwork of wattles. Towers = turrets = towers. The places of security - oh, I should have added this bit from the link: "Cruger quickly countered by using sandbags to raise the height of his parapet, giving enough cover so his own marksmen could fire on the tower through slats between the bags." And what we see is that you are deliberately manipulating things to create your ordering. What do I mean by that? The Caesar text mentions ramparts twice. You choose only the one that fits your modeling. You ignore the frame of pickets because has the same problem. You ignore the height comment - because even though its a parallel, its out of order. So there are two issues in all of this. I can find lots of examples of this sort of language. But lets get back to the bigger problem - because this is just getting lost in the proverbial weeds. You wrote this: 9 hours ago, JarMan said: My hypothesis needs to be falsified based on the content of the Book of Mormon, not its language. But it is the language you are basing this on. The content isn't unique in any way at all. Your comments consistently focus back on the language. It is a necessity, I think, because you intuit the connection from the language. You digitally search the language. There is no question that the idea of earthen fortifications supplanted by timbered walls and towers is not unique in the thousands of years we (humanity) have used them. The same is true for burning people by fire as a form of execution. We can't narrow that down to a particular time or place because it has been used for a very long time in many different places by all sorts of groups of people. So how do you differentiate between them? Why is it one and not the other? That seems to me to be determined by the fact that you have intuited a conclusion and are looking for evidence to support it. I am simply contesting what you consider to be evidence. 9 hours ago, JarMan said: Caesar's description of the fortifications is very compact and in the same order as the Book of Mormon description. This makes it very meaningful because it is evidence for literary dependence. The OP is not just about similarities in fortifications, it's also about similarities in their descriptions. You can't just hand wave these away because they are inconvenient to your pov. No, no, no. I can wave them away because I have a more fundamental understanding of what similarities mean when dealing with texts. I have, over the years, repeatedly asked you for a set of criteria that you would accept for evaluating your parallels. Provide one. Show me that this is more than just a "I know it when I see it" sort of situation. This is not a big ask here. This isn't happening in a vacuum. The question of textual borrowing and textual attribution is not unique to the Book of Mormon. There is a lot of stuff out there. 9 hours ago, JarMan said: The reason I keep bringing it up is because you have a tendency to claim differences are necessarily evidence of non-dependence without explaining why the differences are fatal. My Westside Story example shows the fallacy in that approach. It's the why that matters. This is two-sided, though, so don't get me wrong. I have as much responsibility for explaining why particular differences aren't fatal as you do for showing why they are. No. Your West Side Story example is not an analogue. Your position is that the connection between the West Side Story and Shakespeare's play assumed, and even though there are differences, we don't have to consider the differences because the connection is firmly established. I agree with this. The challenge is that the connection is established - not by using parallels as you are doing - but because the author of the West Side Story script not only claimed to have based it off of Romeo and Juliet, he has provided to the world his working notes to show us exactly how he did it. In terms of this discussion that would be like having a Grotius manuscript in which he suggested he was going to write an allegorical history which reflected the problems he saw with his contemporaries, like Calving, and also pointed out the various pitfalls that could occur in trying to set up a utopian society in the world. Part of what you don't seem to recognize is the problem that comes from claiming that the Book of Mormon is an allegory. Allegories have two meanings. And you need to be able to connect that second meaning back to your alleged author - and that means showing how the text develops his thought. That comes through actually exploring his thought and not engaging in mind reading and the intentional fallacy. 5
Tacenda Posted January 18, 2025 Posted January 18, 2025 Just curious, is this the same as parts of the Bible..word for word.. being in the BoM?
JarMan Posted January 19, 2025 Author Posted January 19, 2025 21 hours ago, webbles said: Just wanted to point out that Foxe is writing about real humans who really went through burning at the stake. They didn't get together and come up with this script. They, individually, chose to give a speech from the flames. They, individually, chose not to recant. So this means that this is something that humans will really do. So the 6 steps you laid out are normal, natural human things to do. It's like saying that I found a textual match because I have a text that says a 1) a heretic, 2) who's bound 3) suffocated 4) using a cross 5) after declining to recant 6) who gives a speech from the cross. That doesn't mean that no one else did those 6 things. Finding a story with those 6 things doesn't mean it is textual linked, because it could easily happen independently. This is much more than about what individual humans will do. It's about how particular societies function. First, you need a society with a religion that has a concept of heresy. Many religions don't. (Regarding this, Abinadi was accused of the same heresy as some Christians in early modern Europe, so it's not just the fact that it was heresy per se.) Then the society needs to believe that heresy is such a heinous thing that it should be punished by an excruciating death. And you also need an authority willing to actually carry out the act. At this point we've probably already narrowed it down to European Christianity. But now lets specify the death is by fire and I think we do have it narrowed down to European Christianity. Now when we add the faggots, the chance to recant, the speech from the flames we definitely have something that looks like what is described by Foxe. If this is all ubiquitous stuff,as you've implied, you should be able to point to other milieus where these things occur. But you can't because there aren't any. 22 hours ago, webbles said: What will become obvious? That Abinadi was burned at the stake or that Foxe is the source of the story of Abinadi or that Foxe wrote the story or that someone who read Foxe wrote Abinadi or that someone who saw an actual burning wrote Abinadi? I have a hard time believing Foxe wrote Abinadi because the writing style is so different. And I have a hard time believing Foxe is the source of the story because what Abinadi went through is a normal death. Foxe was able to find lots and lots of instances of it. So it is extremely likely that Abinadi would have done similar things. It will become obvious that the author of the Book of Mormon was familiar with the burning of heretics as described by Foxe.
JarMan Posted January 19, 2025 Author Posted January 19, 2025 @Calm The problem with trying to see this story in a meso-American context is that either most of the details don't fit or we don't have enough information. Did those cultures have a concept of heresy? Was it so heinous a thing as to require being beaten to death by burning sticks? Did they have a particular heresy regarding the nature of the Christian trinity? Do the other details of the story make sense?
JarMan Posted January 19, 2025 Author Posted January 19, 2025 14 hours ago, Benjamin McGuire said: If this is true, then you need to focus on content and not language. But you are focusing on language and not content. You're 100% wrong about this. My focus is purely on the content. 14 hours ago, Benjamin McGuire said: The Book of Mormon has a tremendous amount of theological content. It's commentary on the Old Testament is extensive. I see very little overlap here with Grotius. It's philosophy of meaning is profound (which I have written about). Where is Grotius's legalistic notion of natural law in the Book of Mormon (this is a subject that Grotius wrote a lot about - he was considered the foremost philosopher on natural law until he was displaced by Kant)? Where is it's take on infant baptism in Grotius? How do we reconcile the Book of Mormon's notion of limited agency with Grotius? How would Grotius view the Book of Mormon's notion that sin is not some sort of absolute but is situational? Grotius and the Book of Mormon both have a lot to say about monarchies and kings - why isn't there any significant overlap? There is very significant overlap between Grotius and Book of Mormon content. Very significant. I know this because I have been studying his works for several years. You've only apparently skimmed a few sources. I've discussed many of these over the years on here. We have significant overlap in soteriology, atonement theory, Erastianism, infant baptism, just war theory, and many, many other things. You're claiming no overlap without doing your research. 16 hours ago, Benjamin McGuire said: There are two things to bring up - we call an entire class of persons martyrs - because their experience shares certain features. Those shared features cannot be used as part of arguments about authorship and textual borrowing - because they are found everywhere. This is the same with talking about digging ditches and building ramparts in warfare - a practice which occurred consistently over thousands of years. Your arguments don't mean as much as you think they do - and if you want to make them mean something, then you need to actually find some sort of recognized method for this sort of thing and engage it so that you are simply practicing parallelomania. But that is just the surface issue here. You bold terms because you think that they are important. But they aren't - it isn't an exact quote. Two words is insufficient in terms of length to give us much (and it isn't identical). But part of it is because your claim involves an entire translation layer. Grotius didn't choose the words "he fell" in your theory - someone else did. So the use of words like this in an alleged translation isn't particularly helpful in trying to show some sort of genetic textual relationship. It simply doesn't work that way. The stake isn't implied at all. And of course, there isn't much in Abinadi's execution that you cannot find in Foxe because, well, Foxe is very graphic - and covers not one or two but dozens of burnings. And when we look more closely at the Foxe account you bring up, we see something different from what you suggest (emphasis added) - This is fascinating because bowing isn't a term that Foxe uses often - and when he does, it is always about an act of worship - consider these two examples: and The entire implication isn't one of falling (as you suggest), but rather that even as he is dying, the martyr (Bishop Hooper) refuses to stop worshiping God. First with his voice - and when that fails, with his arms - and when those fail, he worships with what is left of his body. So these are not the same thing. And the comparison is clearly superficial. This is apart from pointing out the other obvious thing - even if we can find much of the Abinadi burning in Foxe, the Abinadi narrative would be an extremely abbreviated version. It represents only a fraction of what we see in Foxe - and most of what we have in Foxe isn't in the Book of Mormon. If anything we should accept the idea that the Book of Mormon's portrayal of martyrdom isn't meant to be as overly dramatic as the ones that Foxe presents. And finally, as I keep pointing out, all of this is the reason why, when we make these comparisons, we need to be engaging the differences more than the similarities. So tell me which other culture burns their heretics at the stake. Which other cultures have heresies regarding the Christian godhead? Which other cultures have all the elements of Abinadi's story? There aren't any. The elements of Abinadi's story can be uniquely identified in Christian Europe in medieval to early modern times. 14 hours ago, Benjamin McGuire said: These are all huge red flags for me when we discuss content - but I get the sense that they aren't even on your radar because the way that you look for similarities is through the language and not the content - because you keep coming back with these list of phrases that you think represent equivalencies. You are trying to claim that you are doing one thing but all of the language that you are using represents something else. The Julius Caesar example shows not only content borrowing, but direct phrasal borrowing. Phrasal borrowing is not the same thing as looking at the language for similarities, which is what Skousen and Carmack have done. In this example it shows a direct connection between two texts. And you pretend that I haven't listed dozens or hundreds of examples of similar content. You're gonna have to engage with my actual arguments instead of the straw man you've built. 14 hours ago, Benjamin McGuire said: No, Nephi isn't. Let me emphasize a different sort of interpretation - The New Testament is a "record like unto the engravings which are upon the plates of brass, save there are not so many". Naturally, of course, anyone can look at the New Testament and see that it is smaller than the Old Testament, right? And did the first Christians (who were all Jews) receive the covenants of the Lord? Where they considered part of the house of Israel? I think that when you say "obviously" it is in part because you have never really considered the text or its implications. What the angel doesn't say is that the record contains what is in the brass plates (in fact we could argue from the text that the implication is that it specifically doesn't). And the text doesn't say that books were left out. And then we get this: And this also cannot be the Old Testament. The fascinating thing about all of this is that the Brass Plates were a copy of the Old Testament translated into Egyptian. This was a record of the Old Testament already aimed at the Gentiles. And what is being said here isn't some historical reality - that the 12 Apostles (Matthew, Mark, Luke, etc.) were taking the Old Testament to the gentiles - they were taking the new message to them - the new gospel, the new covenants. So then what about: Look, it doesn't even matter if we're talking OT or NT here, the point is that the Book of Mormon is not claiming that scripture was altered. It's saying that some of it was left out. 14 hours ago, Benjamin McGuire said: And you suggest that the obvious thing is the books that are left out - like Enoch. But we run into a different sort of problem here. Catholicism still maintains the Apocrypha as part of the canon. True, Enoch is not in there. But that opens an entirely different can of worms, doesn't it. Enoch isn't quoted in the New Testament. Was Enoch something that was taken to the Gentiles by the Twelve Apostles - only to be later removed by the great and abominable church? And then we have the history problem. The Book of Enoch was completely unknown in the 16th and 17th centuries. It was rediscovered in modern times in an Ethiopian text by James Bruce in the late 18th century. It cannot possibly be something that Hugo Grotius was thinking about. And this brings us back full circle. How does this text in the Book of Mormon relate to Hugo Grotius's thought? Is he ever critical in any of his writings about the removal of deutero-canonical materials from the canon? I be interested in you showing me where that is in his writings. Where does Grotius embrace any deutero-canonical work as containing the purity of the gospel? This position you take not only doesn't answer the original concern I raised, it makes it wider. By defining exactly what you think that Nephi is talking about it creates the need for you to show how that meaning is found in Grotius's thought. Enoch was not first discovered by James Bruce in the late 18th Century. Grotius was aware of its existence in the Ethiopian Church and was quite enamored with it, actually. The fact that it was there indicates it actually was taken to the Gentiles and then left out of the canon.
JarMan Posted January 19, 2025 Author Posted January 19, 2025 (edited) 16 hours ago, Benjamin McGuire said: And then we should take a moment and discuss briefly some of Grotius's influences. Grotius actually published an annotation of the scriptures. This is important to this discussion because it highlights the absence of the issues you raise. Grotius's methods in textual criticism come from Joseph Scaliger. And when we start getting in the text critical works we find an awful lot of material here that - because wasn't as influential as Grotius's works on natural law, didn't get the same widespread distribution. He wrote about the original language of the Gospel of Matthew twice for example (in 1627 and 1641) and determined that it was not originally written in Hebrew, or even in Greek, but in Syriac. And while he occasionally gets into philological discussions, Grotius most frequently engaged in historical contextualization. But, Grotius's annotations is interesting to us within the context of this discussion because he discusses so many passages and their interpretations. Some of these are problematic for the the idea that Grotius wrote the Book of Mormon. Others potentially could be included. After all, Grotius concludes that the Book of Job should be dated to the 5th century BCE (and the Book of Mormon never mentions Job or quotes from it). There is too much to get into, but, I want to provide one quote from Grotius that is really fascinating in the context of this discussion of Nephi and his vision: And yet ... what does Nephi see? Besides the information about Job, which actually supports my hypothesis, I don't see the relevance of anything here. And I'm not sure where you're getting your information about Grotius' annotations, unless it's from secondary sources. As far as I can tell, these are not available in English. And I've read several Grotius biographies so no need to school me on his life. 16 hours ago, Benjamin McGuire said: This is explained in my essay. Nephi claims that he is deliberately preventing his people from understanding the scriptures in the context in which they were originally written. That is, he isn't just providing a new interpretation on top of the old one, he is abandoning the old one. This is out of place in Grotius - and I would challenge you to find anything of this sort in his writings (and there is certainly quite a bit in there about interpreting scripture). It's not my burden to find this in Grotius. You made a claim and the burden is on you to support it. Consider this a CFR. 16 hours ago, Benjamin McGuire said: There is no condescension here. Really. I am simply suggesting what my observations lead me to conclude. That you are drawing these connections from language not from the ideas that are expressed. If you think that I am wrong, then it should be a simple process for you to start showing what Grotius wrote that shares the ideas expressed in the Book of Mormon - that shares the theology, and the understanding of scripture, and the interpretive models, and so on. Grotius wrote an awful lot - he was incredibly influential for a period of time. Pick one of his titles and we can go through it together (so that we are on the same page). Let's see how his ideas are ignored, shared, or repudiated by the Book of Mormon. I've compared much of Grotius' writings to the Book of Mormon on this forum over the last five years or so. But I'm going to take you up on this offer. I'd like to discuss De iure belli ac pacis as it applies to the Book of Mormon. Let's start a new thread to do just that. 16 hours ago, Benjamin McGuire said: Yes they are. And there are some in there that you don't highlight as well. digging up heaps of earth - ridges of earth - timbers - works of timbers - frame of pickets - towers - places of security This is compared to this list: rampart - breastwork - double trench - turrets - breastwork of wattles - rampart (again) - doors and higher turrets But are all these defenses used for a single fort or at least in forts built by the same army? Are they the sort that can be constructed in a short period of time (within a year or so)? 16 hours ago, Benjamin McGuire said: One of the things I included in the first list - that you didn't include - is the frame of pickets. The picket here means simply pointy sticks arranged with the points at the top (usually vertically). we call these Palisades. The rough equivalent to these in the other text (the Caesar text) is the "breastwork of wattles." These are common features of military forts in pre-industrial conditions. Ditches. Ridges of earth. Timber works. Frames of pickets. Towers. Muy first quick search this morning yielded a description of a siege battle in 1781 in South Carolina during the revolutionary war. Let's see: A breastwork of wattles is not the same as a frame of pickets. Another translation has "parapets of osiers." A breastwork of wattles is essentially thatching that shielded the elevated Roman soldiers from arrows and rocks. It's equivalent to the Book of Mormon "places of security to be built upon those towers, that the stones and the arrows of the Lamanites could not hurt them." But, of course by the 18th/19th centuries modern armies weren't using arrows and stones. 16 hours ago, Benjamin McGuire said: Let's see - even in this brief discussion, I have the rampart, the brestwork of wattles, the trenches, the doors, and so on. As I said, these are common military features in pre-industrial warfare. You don't really get any mileage by comparing them. And we can see these same features in the Book of Mormon - the frame of pickets = the abatis = the breastwork of wattles. Towers = turrets = towers. The places of security - oh, I should have added this bit from the link: "Cruger quickly countered by using sandbags to raise the height of his parapet, giving enough cover so his own marksmen could fire on the tower through slats between the bags." And what we see is that you are deliberately manipulating things to create your ordering. What do I mean by that? The Caesar text mentions ramparts twice. You choose only the one that fits your modeling. You ignore the frame of pickets because has the same problem. You ignore the height comment - because even though its a parallel, its out of order. So there are two issues in all of this. I can find lots of examples of this sort of language. You need to find all of the features in a single fortification, or at least in fortifications built by the same army. And I don't ignore the frame of pickets. I'm the one who brought it up. I've already acknowledged that this is mentioned in a different part of Caesar's narrative. And the height comment actually is in the right order. I ignore it because I don't know what "in proportion to the height of the [rampart]" means. Perhaps it means that it was half the height of the rampart, which was 12 feet high. That would be a reasonable interpretation and it would fit with the Book of Mormon's "height of a man" description for this same feature. But since I can't be sure I didn't mention it. Sure, Caesar mentions ramparts twice. He also mentions gates, which the Book of Mormon doesn't. I acknowledge there are differences. But the question is whether they are significant enough to invalidate the point I'm making. I don't think they are. 16 hours ago, Benjamin McGuire said: But lets get back to the bigger problem - because this is just getting lost in the proverbial weeds. You wrote this: But it is the language you are basing this on. The content isn't unique in any way at all. Your comments consistently focus back on the language. It is a necessity, I think, because you intuit the connection from the language. You digitally search the language. There is no question that the idea of earthen fortifications supplanted by timbered walls and towers is not unique in the thousands of years we (humanity) have used them. The same is true for burning people by fire as a form of execution. We can't narrow that down to a particular time or place because it has been used for a very long time in many different places by all sorts of groups of people. So how do you differentiate between them? Why is it one and not the other? That seems to me to be determined by the fact that you have intuited a conclusion and are looking for evidence to support it. I am simply contesting what you consider to be evidence. You've implied several times that I am digitally searching to find parallels. That somehow my methodology is shallow. Nothing could be further from the truth. Of the many works mentioned during this thread, such as Foxe's Book of Martyr's, Caesar's Gallic War, and several by Grotius including several biographies, I've read the majority of the content of each of these if not the entire thing. I doubt you can say the same. And you have a habit of reducing my argument to something you think you can argue with, rather than confronting it head on in its entirety. For example, "The same is true for burning people by fire as a form of execution. We can't narrow that down to a particular time or place because it has been used for a very long time in many different places by all sorts of groups of people." You've left out parts of my argument that are critical. The execution occurs because of heresy. And not just any heresy, but a particular heresy in a particular religion. I've mentioned several other details that align, as well. So now we can narrow that down. 16 hours ago, Benjamin McGuire said: No, no, no. I can wave them away because I have a more fundamental understanding of what similarities mean when dealing with texts. So you say, but you haven't shown that you can properly deal with similarities I've brought up. Instead, you resort to a myriad of dodges and mischaracterizations to avoid addressing them. Or you take a shot at addressing it but only take a surficial approach that turns out to be wrong. 16 hours ago, Benjamin McGuire said: I have, over the years, repeatedly asked you for a set of criteria that you would accept for evaluating your parallels. Provide one. Show me that this is more than just a "I know it when I see it" sort of situation. This is not a big ask here. This isn't happening in a vacuum. The question of textual borrowing and textual attribution is not unique to the Book of Mormon. There is a lot of stuff out there. And this is another one of those dodges. I've answered this question many times already, just not to your liking. But I'll humor you here. I may just misunderstand what you mean by "criteria." So, please define what you mean here. I feel like you've obfuscated on this so that you can purposefully and perpetually levy this argument against me. What exactly is it you are looking for me to provide? 16 hours ago, Benjamin McGuire said: No. Your West Side Story example is not an analogue. Your position is that the connection between the West Side Story and Shakespeare's play assumed, and even though there are differences, we don't have to consider the differences because the connection is firmly established. I agree with this. The challenge is that the connection is established - not by using parallels as you are doing - but because the author of the West Side Story script not only claimed to have based it off of Romeo and Juliet, he has provided to the world his working notes to show us exactly how he did it. In terms of this discussion that would be like having a Grotius manuscript in which he suggested he was going to write an allegorical history which reflected the problems he saw with his contemporaries, like Calving, and also pointed out the various pitfalls that could occur in trying to set up a utopian society in the world. You're misstating my position again. A straw man is always easier to defeat. I'm not going to restate my position again, though, as you'll just continue to misrepresent it anyway. 16 hours ago, Benjamin McGuire said: Part of what you don't seem to recognize is the problem that comes from claiming that the Book of Mormon is an allegory. Allegories have two meanings. And you need to be able to connect that second meaning back to your alleged author - and that means showing how the text develops his thought. That comes through actually exploring his thought and not engaging in mind reading and the intentional fallacy. I don't claim the Book of Mormon is an allegory. I may have said that Abinadi's story is allegorical. I don't know if that's the right word or not. The point is that Abinadi's story is based on the story of Michael Servetus. Edited January 19, 2025 by JarMan
JarMan Posted January 19, 2025 Author Posted January 19, 2025 21 hours ago, The Nehor said: I suspect his wrists and arms were bound to prevent resistance and possibly hobbled but wasn’t secured to anything so he cand then they beat him with firebrands/torches. Then he fell forward as he died. Also possible he was secured to something overhead or was bound over a bench or table and beaten that way and fell forward after his struggles as he died. There are lots of ways to do this. I suspect he was anchored to something. The approach with this kind of torture from what I know of it is to use blunt trauma and then to also hold the brand against the skin. There may have been some doing the beating and others focused on burning. There are a lot of ways to do this and make it a horrifying spectacle. The phrase "death by fire" is used at least 7 times to describe this process. Never "death by beating" or anything like that.
The Nehor Posted January 19, 2025 Posted January 19, 2025 Just now, JarMan said: The phrase "death by fire" is used at least 7 times to describe this process. Never "death by beating" or anything like that. And it is likely that the burning is what finished Abinadi and the others off. Remember that this is torture meant to serve as a warning to others. It is meant to be horrific and slow and painful. While I am sure there is some hitting involved the point is not to kill the victim that way. Better to slowly burn them in agony for as long as possible. To be clear I only mean better if your intentions are horrific and you think this kind of grotesque public spectacle works as a scare tactic. I consider torture to be evil. It dehumanizes the torturer and the victim. 1
webbles Posted January 19, 2025 Posted January 19, 2025 (edited) 13 hours ago, JarMan said: This is much more than about what individual humans will do. It's about how particular societies function. First, you need a society with a religion that has a concept of heresy. Many religions don't. (Regarding this, Abinadi was accused of the same heresy as some Christians in early modern Europe, so it's not just the fact that it was heresy per se.) Then the society needs to believe that heresy is such a heinous thing that it should be punished by an excruciating death. And you also need an authority willing to actually carry out the act. At this point we've probably already narrowed it down to European Christianity. But now lets specify the death is by fire and I think we do have it narrowed down to European Christianity. Now when we add the faggots, the chance to recant, the speech from the flames we definitely have something that looks like what is described by Foxe. If this is all ubiquitous stuff,as you've implied, you should be able to point to other milieus where these things occur. But you can't because there aren't any. The Romans (pre-Christian) burned Christians. Muslims burned apostates. Japanese burned early Christians. There's lots of historical civilizations that burned people for heretical positions. We have lots of actual written records on why people in Europe were burned and we don't have as good historical records for outside of Europe. But that doesn't mean that it only occurred in Europe. Killing heretics is done by lots of civilizations. Edited to add: For example, Emperor Diocletion ordered that followers of Manichaeism to be burned. This is the same emperor who also persecuted Christians. Edited January 19, 2025 by webbles 1
Benjamin McGuire Posted January 20, 2025 Posted January 20, 2025 19 hours ago, JarMan said: You're 100% wrong about this. My focus is purely on the content. My assessment is not based on what you say, but on what you do. In the OP, you highlighted phrases - that is not content but language. And the reason why you need to do it this way is that the idea of earthen fortifications isn't going to be unique in any context that we discuss. If language wasn't the focus, then the order of the terms would be irrelevant - because the content order isn't particularly important. The focus on specific phrases that you continually present isn't content - it is language. And this is the reason why I stand by my comment. 19 hours ago, JarMan said: There is very significant overlap between Grotius and Book of Mormon content. Very significant. I know this because I have been studying his works for several years. You've only apparently skimmed a few sources. I've discussed many of these over the years on here. We have significant overlap in soteriology, atonement theory, Erastianism, infant baptism, just war theory, and many, many other things. You're claiming no overlap without doing your research. Except that what you present isn't meaningful. Much of the time, my experience has been that you are forcing readings onto the texts without understanding them. At the same time, you run into a problem when you are trying to claim authorship, and that is that once something can be found in multiple sources, its usefulness for authorship attribution plummets. This is an issue that has been raised in these questions for a long time - W.H. Bennett wrote this more than a century ago (I'll reference my essay which has the complete bibliographical references): Quote (iii.) In considering two similar passages, A and B, there are at least three possible explanations of their resemblance. A may be dependent on B, or B on A, or both A and B may be dependent on something prior to both of them. A critic with a theory—and everybody starts with a prepossession in favour of some theory —is tempted to take for granted that the relation of the parallel passages is in accordance with his theory. If he holds that B is older than A, it seems to him that A is so obviously dependent on B, that this dependence proves the early date of B. But, as a rule, it is very difficult to determine which of two similar passages is dependent [Page 37]on the other. Often the question can only be settled by our knowledge that one passage is taken from an earlier work than the other; and where we do not possess such knowledge the priority is quite uncertain, and a comparison of the passages yields little or no evidence as to the date of the documents in which they occur. . . . E.C. Oliphant, thirty years later wrote this: Quote And, even if the suggested parallel passes that test, we have yet to ask ourselves whether or not it cannot be paralleled in the work of some other writer than the one to whom it is desired to attribute both passages. Muriel St. Clare Byrne follows with this: Quote Parallels may be susceptible to at least three explanations: (a) unsuspected identity of authorship (b) plagiarism, either deliberate or unconscious (c) coincidence; ... In order to express ourselves as certain of attributions we must prove exhaustively that we cannot parallel words, images, and phrases as a body from other acknowledged plays of the period; in other words, the negative check must always be applied. In 2002, Harold Love, in his book Attributing Authorship (which deals specifically with this process that you are going through) makes this observation: Quote Here LION, Gutenberg and similar electronic archives come into their own, since as well as providing illusory parallels they also assist mightily in shooting down those which arise from common parlance of the time. Once we have encountered an unusual expression in the writings of three of four different authors it ceases to have any value for attribution. This is for the unusual stuff. The common things never have any value to begin with. So we have these fairly common ideas in the Book of Mormon. Their appearance also in Grotius doesn't give us much in terms of positive evidence - because it isn't particularly useful in showing or connecting authorship. But, that aside, the Book of Mormon's soteriology is nothing at all like Grotius's. I have already brought that up in this thread - and so far, you have simply ignored it. For example, Grotius follows a Governmental Theory for the atonement. That is, for Grotius, Christ's atonement is not a penal substitution at all, but a penal example. This is in fact very different from the Book of Mormon, which has an almost Calvanistic doctrine of penal substitution. Alma 34, for example, is pretty clear on this point - Quote Behold, I say unto you, that I do know that Christ shall come among the children of men, to take upon him the transgressions of his people, and that he shall atone for the sins of the world; for the Lord God hath spoken it. Find me something like this in Grotius. What I read in Grotius is that the atonement is merely a demonstration of justice and not justice itself. The atonement doesn't remove sin from anyone - it removes God's judgement of the sin. The law is immutable for Grotius - and sin is the violation of the immutable law - the atonement doesn't restore man's purity, it's purpose is to restore the law. The Book of Mormon is a very far cry from this sort of theology - and not just over the idea of a substitutionary atonement. For the Book of Mormon, the law itself is neither immutable nor universally applicable. The idea in Moroni 8 is completely foreign to Grotius (much more than just a little): Quote For the power of redemption cometh on all them that have no law; wherefore, he that is not condemned, or he that is under no condemnation, cannot repent; and unto such baptism availeth nothing The idea that the Law isn't universal and universally applied isn't, I think, imaginable to Grotius. Yet, here we have it in the Book of Mormon. You want to suggest that I have a shallow reading of Grotius, but where does this leave you when I bring up these issues and there is no response? Look, if you think that Grotius is very much like the Book of Mormon in terms of his theology - his soteriology - then quote the passages in Grotius and the passages in the Book of Mormon that you think are the most alike. And then perform that negative check - post the passages that you think are the most different - and lets have a discussion about the merits of the pros versus the cons. 19 hours ago, JarMan said: So tell me which other culture burns their heretics at the stake. Which other cultures have heresies regarding the Christian godhead? Which other cultures have all the elements of Abinadi's story? There aren't any. The elements of Abinadi's story can be uniquely identified in Christian Europe in medieval to early modern times. Wow. Why don't we just start with the burning at the stake - because it's not in the Book of Mormon - no matter how badly you want it to be there. 19 hours ago, JarMan said: The Julius Caesar example shows not only content borrowing, but direct phrasal borrowing. Phrasal borrowing is not the same thing as looking at the language for similarities, which is what Skousen and Carmack have done. In this example it shows a direct connection between two texts. And you pretend that I haven't listed dozens or hundreds of examples of similar content. You're gonna have to engage with my actual arguments instead of the straw man you've built. It does not demonstrate borrowing at all. It isn't what Skousen and Carmack have done. And your example doesn't show a direct connection between the texts. It really doesn't matter how many times you repeat this. Skousen and Carmack work within recognized linguistic frameworks. You don't work within a recognized framework at all - and the quotes I point out above show the problems that you have (not to mention the brief analysis I provided in terms of the language issues). In how many different passages does the Book of Mormon discuss fortifications? In how many does the Caesar text? Is it any surprise to us that you can find one in each that have the strongest similarity? And yet, in the end, this is incapable of telling us what you want it to tell us - because there is no uniqueness. There is nothing in the Book of Mormon that would suggest the Caesar text as a source. And all of this is ignoring the whole problem that translation gives to this question. How much of the word choice and word order is made by that translator and not by your alleged author Grotius (I'll give you a hint - the translator is responsible for all of the word choice ...). 19 hours ago, JarMan said: Look, it doesn't even matter if we're talking OT or NT here, the point is that the Book of Mormon is not claiming that scripture was altered. It's saying that some of it was left out. I think that you are trying to re-describe this in a way that is friendlier to your argument. The Book of Mormon suggests that what changes were made were deliberate - that is, whatever was removed (and there is no suggestion that this is entire books - rather "they have taken away from the gospel of the Lamb many parts which are plain and most precious; and also many covenants of the Lord have they taken away." And the purpose of removing this isn't some sort of accident - it is a deliberate attempt to corrupt the scriptures: "And all this have they done that they might pervert the right ways of the Lord, that they might blind the eyes and harden the hearts of the children of men." And this deliberate corruption of scripture is exactly what Grotius says that God would never allow to happen. 19 hours ago, JarMan said: Enoch was not first discovered by James Bruce in the late 18th Century. Grotius was aware of its existence in the Ethiopian Church and was quite enamored with it, actually. The fact that it was there indicates it actually was taken to the Gentiles and then left out of the canon. CFR on this. I say this because this is what I have on this question - that Grotius was familiar with a fragmentary Enoch text in Greek (likely the fragment published by Kircher in 1637). Quote Holstenius informed Peiresc that he once heard the renowned Dutch jurist Hugo Grotius (1583-1645) say that he had done some work on the Greek version of the Book of Enoch. Peiresc told Saumaise he was willing to pay handsomely for a transcript of the Greek text and on 7/17 April he wrote to Grotius, at that time the resident Swedish ambassador in Paris, imploring him to share his research. Peiresc, however, first received a response to an earlier communication concerning his untranslated Ethiopic volume: Grotius referred him to Scaliger’s Thesaurus temporum. On 10/20 April Peiresc wrote to Grotius again, asking for his opinion on Syncellus’s excerpts from the Book of Enoch and information as to the whereabouts of the manuscript used by Scaliger. Hessayon, Scripture and Scholarship in Early Modern England. Hessayon cites personal correspondence in the footnotes. Perhaps you have more information than I have - if you do, I am certainly interested in it. This wouldn't alter my position though. 2
JarMan Posted January 20, 2025 Author Posted January 20, 2025 9 hours ago, webbles said: The Romans (pre-Christian) burned Christians. Muslims burned apostates. Japanese burned early Christians. There's lots of historical civilizations that burned people for heretical positions. We have lots of actual written records on why people in Europe were burned and we don't have as good historical records for outside of Europe. But that doesn't mean that it only occurred in Europe. Killing heretics is done by lots of civilizations. Edited to add: For example, Emperor Diocletion ordered that followers of Manichaeism to be burned. This is the same emperor who also persecuted Christians. Killing heretics is not done by lots of civilizations. Name one. Rome didn't burn Christians because they were heretics. Neither did Japan. A heretic is someone of the same religion. And an apostate is not the same thing as a heretic. However, I'm interested in your source that Muslims burned apostates. Also, the method of burning here (at the stake) is also important along with the other details of the execution.
JarMan Posted January 20, 2025 Author Posted January 20, 2025 17 hours ago, The Nehor said: And it is likely that the burning is what finished Abinadi and the others off. Remember that this is torture meant to serve as a warning to others. It is meant to be horrific and slow and painful. While I am sure there is some hitting involved the point is not to kill the victim that way. Better to slowly burn them in agony for as long as possible. To be clear I only mean better if your intentions are horrific and you think this kind of grotesque public spectacle works as a scare tactic. I consider torture to be evil. It dehumanizes the torturer and the victim. I'll just state the obvious here. You can't be burned to death from being beaten by burning sticks.
Benjamin McGuire Posted January 20, 2025 Posted January 20, 2025 17 hours ago, JarMan said: t's not my burden to find this in Grotius. You made a claim and the burden is on you to support it. Consider this a CFR. Since I don't have the time to go through Grotius himself at the moment to show what he does, here are a couple of sources that discuss it. Jonge, H. J. de. (1983). Grotius as an Interpreter of the Bible, particularly the New Testament: Quote What is significant here is not so much the content of Grotius' assumptions as his methods. He endeavoured to understand the books of the New Testament as a product of the time when they were written; to this end he tested and revised traditional ideas on their genesis by the application of other known historical data. ... Grotius was more successful than any other annotator in elucidating the writings of the New Testament as documents belonging to the time they were written. Moreover he was able to understand them from their original place in history with a method which can justly be regarded as a beginning of literary criticism. ... He realised that the church's attempts to Interpret the New Testament in modern terms only led to discord. It was his view that the unity of the churches, his great ideal, could only be served by an Interpretation of the New Testament in terms of its original meaning in the early church. That's pretty straight forward. Mark Somos in his Secularisation and the Leiden Circle offers a much more interesting approach that addresses this through the outcomes - that is, what Grotius was doing with his interpretive strategies: Quote The argument is not that atheists did not exist, but that Scaliger, Heinsius, Vossius, Cunaeus and Grotius secularised in the pursuit of peace, without being atheists. The process of secularisation is not identical with secularism as a norm. ... Secularisation, by contrast, refers to the process of gradual, and often unintentional, removal of Christian theology from all aspects of thought. From the fourth to the seventeenth century, Christian theology underpinned all aspects of thought, from the natural sciences to international relations (IR). As the Reformation eroded Catholic doctrinal monopoly, much of European thought broke down. ‘Secularisation’ is the process whereby Europe’s Weltanschauung was rebuilt without theology. By engaging in his historical criticism, Grotius was taking contemporary theology out of scriptural interpretation (as well as out of everything else). Somos later writes: Quote The aim is to demonstrate, on the one hand, how Grotius’s trademark legal arguments, which made him ‘the father of modern international law,’ fit in with the rest of the Leiden project, and on the other hand to show one secularising strategy deployed in IPC [De iure praedae commentarie], that of biblical neutralisation, as an illustration of how to read and find the same strategies in his other books. The editions mentioned readily lend themselves to a proper understanding; instead I will focus here on IPC. ... On the contrary, some of them hoped to save religion by disjoining it from politics, while others did have an anti-religious and/or a radically skeptical agenda. As long as they meant to solve post-Reformation violence by disentangling religion and politics, this whole range of theories can rightly be called ‘secularising’, though not always ‘secular.’ Secularising solutions, from institutionalised toleration to natural laws that would apply even ‘if there is no God,’ added up to a conceptual toolkit that gradually made it impossible to continue or revive religious politics. After the Reformation blew up the foundations under Europe’s entire conceptual edifice, this trial-and-error process of reconstruction eventually led to the secular state, modern international law and historiography, and ‘new science.’ It was not a straightforward process by any means, but Grotius was responsible for much of the winning strategy and the eventual shape of the new world order that International Relations specialists now tend to epitomise as ‘the Westphalian system. ... In addition to explicitly denying the applicability of the Bible in a legal dispute, we will see how he rebutted anyone who mixed religion with politics, including Catholics, such as the Iberian legal theorists, those who attributed the Spanish and Portuguese conquests to divine ordainment, papal apologists, but also Protestants like the Mennonite pacifists, the Calvinist resistance theories in contemporary Dutch writings and in the Vindiciae, and chosen nation theorists of all countries and denominations. His peculiar use of the Fathers also seems to be in keeping with the rest of his secularising strategy. This chapter aims to present a few of Grotius’s unusual Bible-interpretations, and suggests that their oddity is best explained in two contexts: Leiden secularisation as Grotius’s intellectual background, and the Dutch-Iberian conflict as the occasion for writing IPC. These contexts indicate that the main thrust of IPC’s argument is that the Bible must not be used in legal and political arguments, especially not in international legal disputes. Elsewhere, Somos also makes this observation, which is important although not directly related to the request: Quote Grotius laid out with brilliant legalistic logic and rhetoric the case for Erastianism and the ability of magistrates to guarantee peace if and only if the churchmen did not interfere in politics. Obviously, King Benjamin is a problem, right? King Mosiah? Oooh, the irony of Mosiah 29:42 - "And it came to pass that Alma was appointed to be the first chief judge, he being also the high priest, his father having conferred the office upon him, and having given him the charge concerning all the affairs of the church." Yes, that sounds so much like Grotius, right? Johannes Van den Berg, in his "Grotius' Views on Antichrist and Apocalyptic Thought in England", in Hugo Grotius - Theologian, gives us a really good example of this - and an example that is relevant to the Book of Mormon (and more specifically, to Nephi's development): Quote Grotius' explicit rejection of the Protestant consensus was a shock to the great majority of English Protestants. Katherine Firth remarks: Quote Grotius had done what seemed impossible to most Protestants - he had dispensed not only with the idea that the Revelation comprehended the history of the Church from Christ to the second coming but also with the identification of the Roman papacy with Antichrist. This struck at the heart of the Protestant apocalyptic tradition. ... In 1641 Grotius answered, now under his own name, in his Appendix ad interpretationem locorum N. Testamenti quae de Antichristo agunt. In his exegesis of the relevant texts he gave a historical explanation. He identified "the man of sin," "the son of perdition" of II Thessalonians 2.3 with the Emperor Caligula ('Cajus'), "that Wicked" in the same chapter (vs. 8 ) with Simon Magus (Acts8.9-25) and "Antichrist" (I John 2.18) with the pseudo-Messiah Barkochba. The blasphemous Beast which rose up out of the sea represented the idolatry of heathen Rome (Rev. 13.1; "ex mari" is "ex populo Romano"), while "the great whore that sitteth upon many waters" (Rev. 17.1) was equally identified with "Roma gentilis." This is a rejection of the idea of likening scripture - in action. It applies scripture strictly to its historical context. This is something quite foreign to Nephi. And to put this into perspective, here is what I wrote about Nephi's justification: Quote he tells us: Quote I know that the Jews do understand the things of the prophets, and there is none other people that understand the things which were spoken unto the Jews like unto them, save it be that they are taught after the manner of the things of the Jews. … but behold, I, of myself, have dwelt at Jerusalem, wherefore I know concerning the regions round about. (2 Nephi 25:6–7) If Nephi is aware that certain knowledge is necessary to understand Isaiah, and is in possession of that information, then he as an author would be expected to provide that knowledge so that his text too could be understood. Rabinowitz explains that a novel dealing with the political environment of the 1960s might achieve its intended “sense of impending doom only if the reader knows that John F. Kennedy will be assassinated when the events of the novel reach 22 November 1963.” The effect would be lost on an audience unfamiliar with that history, and if the author anticipated this in an audience, he would need to “rewrite the book accordingly.”13 Nephi, on the other hand, while recognizing this issue, takes us in the opposite direction: Quote For I, Nephi, have not taught them many things concerning the manner of the Jews; … But behold, I, Nephi, have not taught my children after the manner of the Jews. (2 Nephi 25:2, 6) Nephi has deliberately prevented his authorial audience from being able to understand Isaiah in the same way that Nephi understands Isaiah, and at the same time, he is letting that audience know that this step in his writing is not merely accidental, or caused by Nephi’s own flawed assumptions in creating his authorial audience. This development is deliberate. What remains is something even more radical. The authorial audience is an audience that doesn’t have this social and cultural knowledge and, in fact, that may have no recourse to receive it. Nephi withheld this information from the authorial audience. Nephi goes completely against this historicizing the text by preventing the reading of it in the historical context that is so important to Grotius. (And this is, of course, in addition to the difference in interpretations of the Book of Revelation that we read about in Grotius and the Book of Mormon). 19 hours ago, JarMan said: I've compared much of Grotius' writings to the Book of Mormon on this forum over the last five years or so. But I'm going to take you up on this offer. I'd like to discuss De iure belli ac pacis as it applies to the Book of Mormon. Let's start a new thread to do just that. Not really. You have compared this itty bitty slice of Grotius to the Book of Mormon. But sure, we can do that. And a new thread is a good place to start that. 19 hours ago, JarMan said: But are all these defenses used for a single fort or at least in forts built by the same army? Are they the sort that can be constructed in a short period of time (within a year or so)? Absolutely. 19 hours ago, JarMan said: A breastwork of wattles is not the same as a frame of pickets. Another translation has "parapets of osiers." A breastwork of wattles is essentially thatching that shielded the elevated Roman soldiers from arrows and rocks. It's equivalent to the Book of Mormon "places of security to be built upon those towers, that the stones and the arrows of the Lamanites could not hurt them." But, of course by the 18th/19th centuries modern armies weren't using arrows and stones. I am pretty sure that a breastwork of wattles and the frame of pickets are similar enough. Remember though, that you are dealing with an EModE translation of original in Latin or Dutch - and it is the translator that chooses the specific words. The ditches, the ramparts - muskets aren't going to be sufficiently different to change the nature of the defenses (which is why I specify pre-industrial). 19 hours ago, JarMan said: But the question is whether they are significant enough to invalidate the point I'm making. I don't think they are. And I am saying that they are. Well, actually, I am saying that this is the minor argument - the bigger argument is whether the comparison is valid in the first place. But, since we are at an impasse, how do you defend your argument other than simply saying that you think it is right? Because that's all I keep getting. 19 hours ago, JarMan said: You've implied several times that I am digitally searching to find parallels. That somehow my methodology is shallow. Nothing could be further from the truth. Of the many works mentioned during this thread, such as Foxe's Book of Martyr's, Caesar's Gallic War, and several by Grotius including several biographies, I've read the majority of the content of each of these if not the entire thing. I doubt you can say the same. I don't believe you. Really, I don't. If you had actually read Grotius (and I have read a fair amount at this point) you wouldn't be so keen on suggesting how similar he is to the Book of Mormon - but let's save that for the other thread, ok? 19 hours ago, JarMan said: And this is another one of those dodges. I've answered this question many times already, just not to your liking. But I'll humor you here. I may just misunderstand what you mean by "criteria." So, please define what you mean here. I feel like you've obfuscated on this so that you can purposefully and perpetually levy this argument against me. What exactly is it you are looking for me to provide? I am looking for you to provide the criteria by which you separate parallels that come from a genetic connection between texts (when an author deliberately uses or engages another text), when the parallels come from some other relationship (when texts share a source, or when texts draw from a common pool of knowledge), and when parallels are simply coincidental. How do you grade parallels to determine whether or not they are significant. I am not particularly interested in your own methods - I would like you to pick a published set of criteria so that we can apply them to the parallels that you claim lead us to conclude that the Book of Mormon uses other texts and sources deliberately in a genetic connection. 19 hours ago, JarMan said: You're misstating my position again. A straw man is always easier to defeat. I'm not going to restate my position again, though, as you'll just continue to misrepresent it anyway. It's not a straw man. I am addressing what you write. Perhaps you aren't being as clear in your position as you think you are. The quotes I offered in my previous post will point to the necessity of distinguishing between claims of reliance that are based on internal and external information. 19 hours ago, JarMan said: I don't claim the Book of Mormon is an allegory. I may have said that Abinadi's story is allegorical. I don't know if that's the right word or not. The point is that Abinadi's story is based on the story of Michael Servetus. Maybe you missed what I posted earlier: On 1/16/2023 at 3:09 AM, JarMan said: The Book of Mormon isn't shy about criticizing Calvinism. But it takes this a step further and blasts Calvin, himself, by representing him allegorically as King Noah. Meanwhile, Abinadi is used allegorically to represent a real-life martyr Calvin burned at the stake. Have you changed your mind since then? (I mean if you have, I'll retract the statement).
Benjamin McGuire Posted January 20, 2025 Posted January 20, 2025 1 hour ago, JarMan said: I'll just state the obvious here. You can't be burned to death from being beaten by burning sticks. Yes - that is a problem with the text, isn't it. Skousen in his critical text edition suggests that the text should be emended: Quote they took him and bound him and scorched his skin with fagots / yea even unto death (Analysis of Textual Variants of the Book of Mormon, p. 1363)
JarMan Posted January 20, 2025 Author Posted January 20, 2025 21 minutes ago, Benjamin McGuire said: My assessment is not based on what you say, but on what you do. In the OP, you highlighted phrases - that is not content but language. And the reason why you need to do it this way is that the idea of earthen fortifications isn't going to be unique in any context that we discuss. If language wasn't the focus, then the order of the terms would be irrelevant - because the content order isn't particularly important. The focus on specific phrases that you continually present isn't content - it is language. And this is the reason why I stand by my comment. You're obfuscating here, as I'll demonstrate. You said, "What sort of occurrence of Late Modern English vocabulary or linguistic characteristic would prove fatal to the hypothesis that the text was written by Grotius, translated shortly after it was written in EModE by an unknown translator, and then later updated by another unknown redactor?" I replied, "My hypothesis needs to be falsified based on the content of the Book of Mormon, not its language." To which you said, "If this is true, then you need to focus on content and not language." The context here has you accusing me of relying on the EModE language to support my hypothesis. When I say that's 100% untrue you change the definition of "language" (from meaning the presence of EModE in the Book of Mormon) to mean specific words I've highlighted. And your wrong that what I've highlighted isn't content. The two sources have almost no shared vocabulary for the similarities described. The similarities, therefore, are almost purely content related. What's going on here is that you don't have a good explanation for the order of phrasing so you are inventing problems with me bringing it up in the first place. This is your typical dodge tactic and it leaves this aspect of my argument completely unanswered. 40 minutes ago, Benjamin McGuire said: Except that what you present isn't meaningful. Much of the time, my experience has been that you are forcing readings onto the texts without understanding them. At the same time, you run into a problem when you are trying to claim authorship, and that is that once something can be found in multiple sources, its usefulness for authorship attribution plummets. This is an issue that has been raised in these questions for a long time - W.H. Bennett wrote this more than a century ago (I'll reference my essay which has the complete bibliographical references): You are the one forcing readings onto the text. For example, the Abinadi story is clearly describing the burning of a heretic at the stake. You first tried to say "we have a lot of literature from the time period (between Grotius and 1830) that describes people being burned at the stake. And none of them look like what we read in Mosiah 17." Yet it turns out it looks very much like what we read in Mosiah 17. I listed several similarities that make this obvious. This is meaningful. Instead of adequately addressing these, you've just doubled down with nothing at all to support some alternate reading of the text, which you haven't even explained, btw. And you're forcing Nephi's vision to say that scripture was changed. It doesn't say that at all. It says things were taken away or kept back. This is consistent with the idea that books were left out of the canon. 56 minutes ago, Benjamin McGuire said: This is for the unusual stuff. The common things never have any value to begin with. So we have these fairly common ideas in the Book of Mormon. Their appearance also in Grotius doesn't give us much in terms of positive evidence - because it isn't particularly useful in showing or connecting authorship. But, that aside, the Book of Mormon's soteriology is nothing at all like Grotius's. I have already brought that up in this thread - and so far, you have simply ignored it. For example, Grotius follows a Governmental Theory for the atonement. That is, for Grotius, Christ's atonement is not a penal substitution at all, but a penal example. This is in fact very different from the Book of Mormon, which has an almost Calvanistic doctrine of penal substitution. Alma 34, for example, is pretty clear on this point - You didn't bring up soteriology, you brought up atonement theory. Both of these topics I have covered at length in past discussions over the years. The Book of Mormon is in line with Grotius on both of these. I'm not ignoring these, I'm prioritizing my limited time. 1 hour ago, Benjamin McGuire said: Find me something like this in Grotius. What I read in Grotius is that the atonement is merely a demonstration of justice and not justice itself. The atonement doesn't remove sin from anyone - it removes God's judgement of the sin. The law is immutable for Grotius - and sin is the violation of the immutable law - the atonement doesn't restore man's purity, it's purpose is to restore the law. The Book of Mormon is a very far cry from this sort of theology - and not just over the idea of a substitutionary atonement. For the Book of Mormon, the law itself is neither immutable nor universally applicable. The idea in Moroni 8 is completely foreign to Grotius (much more than just a little): The idea that the Law isn't universal and universally applied isn't, I think, imaginable to Grotius. Yet, here we have it in the Book of Mormon. You want to suggest that I have a shallow reading of Grotius, but where does this leave you when I bring up these issues and there is no response? Look, if you think that Grotius is very much like the Book of Mormon in terms of his theology - his soteriology - then quote the passages in Grotius and the passages in the Book of Mormon that you think are the most alike. And then perform that negative check - post the passages that you think are the most different - and lets have a discussion about the merits of the pros versus the cons. As I said I've covered this ground before and it's clear you don't understand Grotius' theology. I really don't have the time to correct you on every thing you pluck out of context. I suggest you spend more time getting familiar with it instead of peppering me with bits of things you think contradict the Book of Mormon. 1 hour ago, Benjamin McGuire said: Wow. Why don't we just start with the burning at the stake - because it's not in the Book of Mormon - no matter how badly you want it to be there. 🙄 1 hour ago, Benjamin McGuire said: It does not demonstrate borrowing at all. It isn't what Skousen and Carmack have done. And your example doesn't show a direct connection between the texts. It really doesn't matter how many times you repeat this. Skousen and Carmack work within recognized linguistic frameworks. You don't work within a recognized framework at all - and the quotes I point out above show the problems that you have (not to mention the brief analysis I provided in terms of the language issues). In how many different passages does the Book of Mormon discuss fortifications? In how many does the Caesar text? Is it any surprise to us that you can find one in each that have the strongest similarity? And yet, in the end, this is incapable of telling us what you want it to tell us - because there is no uniqueness. There is nothing in the Book of Mormon that would suggest the Caesar text as a source. And all of this is ignoring the whole problem that translation gives to this question. How much of the word choice and word order is made by that translator and not by your alleged author Grotius (I'll give you a hint - the translator is responsible for all of the word choice ...). Simply proclaiming this doesn't make it so. You haven't offered any substantive rebuttal. All you've done is show that there were some similarities to fortifications in the 18th/19th Centuries if you search wide and far enough. 1 hour ago, Benjamin McGuire said: I think that you are trying to re-describe this in a way that is friendlier to your argument. The Book of Mormon suggests that what changes were made were deliberate - that is, whatever was removed (and there is no suggestion that this is entire books - rather "they have taken away from the gospel of the Lamb many parts which are plain and most precious; and also many covenants of the Lord have they taken away." And the purpose of removing this isn't some sort of accident - it is a deliberate attempt to corrupt the scriptures: "And all this have they done that they might pervert the right ways of the Lord, that they might blind the eyes and harden the hearts of the children of men." And this deliberate corruption of scripture is exactly what Grotius says that God would never allow to happen. The Book of Mormon doesn't say scripture was corrupted, but taken away. You are changing the meaning of words to mean what you want them to mean in order to support your position. 1 hour ago, Benjamin McGuire said: CFR on this. I say this because this is what I have on this question - that Grotius was familiar with a fragmentary Enoch text in Greek (likely the fragment published by Kircher in 1637). Hessayon, Scripture and Scholarship in Early Modern England. Hessayon cites personal correspondence in the footnotes. Perhaps you have more information than I have - if you do, I am certainly interested in it. This wouldn't alter my position though. This source has a lot of good information: https://www.google.com/books/edition/Rediscovering_Enoch_The_Antediluvian_Pas/2VCuEAAAQBAJ?hl=en&gbpv=0 Scaliger published excerpts in 1606. Grotius apparently published a commentary on it. One thing I learned from this is that Enoch was referenced in the NT and by many early church fathers who treated it as scripture. But around the 4th Century is was banned by the church, or at least that was the perception. That narrative fits quite well with "after the book hath gone forth through the hands of the great and abominable church, that there are many plain and precious things taken away from the book..."
Benjamin McGuire Posted January 20, 2025 Posted January 20, 2025 1 hour ago, JarMan said: Killing heretics is not done by lots of civilizations. Name one. Rome didn't burn Christians because they were heretics. Neither did Japan. A heretic is someone of the same religion. And an apostate is not the same thing as a heretic. However, I'm interested in your source that Muslims burned apostates. Also, the method of burning here (at the stake) is also important along with the other details of the execution. I think that there are a couple of things here - Abinadi was not killed for being a heretic. Mosiah 11:28 tells us: Quote I command you to bring Abinadi hither, that I may slay him, for he has said these things that he might stir up my people to anger one with another, and to raise contentions among my people; therefore I will slay him. This isn't a charge of heresy. Similarly in 13:1: Quote And now when the king had heard these words, he said unto his priests: Away with this fellow, and slay him; for what have we to do with him, for he is mad. Burning to death as a form of capital punishment is common to lots of cultures. But to insist that we find corollaries to your interpretation (when we don't agree with it) isn't exactly a meaningful way to move the discussion forward. 2
webbles Posted January 20, 2025 Posted January 20, 2025 2 hours ago, JarMan said: Killing heretics is not done by lots of civilizations. Name one. Rome didn't burn Christians because they were heretics. Neither did Japan. A heretic is someone of the same religion. And an apostate is not the same thing as a heretic. However, I'm interested in your source that Muslims burned apostates. Also, the method of burning here (at the stake) is also important along with the other details of the execution. Sure, they aren't 100% identical, but Abinadi's trial and burning also isn't 100% identical to Foxe's stories or Michael Servetus. You are picking and choosing items that you think are more important and diminishing other items. Abinadi was never called a heretic. You think he was a heretic based on how you define a heretic, but he also could be classified an apostate (though he would say that the priests are the apostates). He also could be classified as teaching a completely new religion (with shared scripture, like Judaism and Christianity). Also, an important event in Abinadi's burning is the fact that Noah almost let him go. The priests had to tell Noah that Abinadi had reviled him. So the reason for Abinadi's death isn't his teachings, but that Noah didn't like being reviled. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Certain_accursed_ones_of_no_significance and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_by_burning#Barbary_States,_18th_century for Muslim burning. 1
Benjamin McGuire Posted January 20, 2025 Posted January 20, 2025 28 minutes ago, JarMan said: And your wrong that what I've highlighted isn't content. The two sources have almost no shared vocabulary for the similarities described. The similarities, therefore, are almost purely content related. What's going on here is that you don't have a good explanation for the order of phrasing so you are inventing problems with me bringing it up in the first place. This is your typical dodge tactic and it leaves this aspect of my argument completely unanswered. No. You are missing the point. The order of the words is meaningless because it is independent of the content - it is a language issue, not a content issue. Word order is a language issue. This isn't to say that you can't use language to demonstrate textual relationships or plagiarism - but when you do, you need to generally show exact language overlaps and not similar language. 31 minutes ago, JarMan said: And your wrong that what I've highlighted isn't content. The two sources have almost no shared vocabulary for the similarities described. The similarities, therefore, are almost purely content related. What's going on here is that you don't have a good explanation for the order of phrasing so you are inventing problems with me bringing it up in the first place. This is your typical dodge tactic and it leaves this aspect of my argument completely unanswered. The reason why it isn't content is that you aren't actually focusing on meaning. You are simply saying here are words - see how they are parallels? Part of the reason for this is that the language is describing relatively common things. It would seem rather silly to say that there is some important meaning behind a military commander ordering his troops to do something (its what military leaders do after all). Just as importantly, as I pointed out, you have to pick and choose which instance of the word rampart to use, and which instance of the word timber to use. The more frequently these words appear in the text, the less useful they become for something like this. The order of your parallels becomes contrived. 35 minutes ago, JarMan said: You are the one forcing readings onto the text. For example, the Abinadi story is clearly describing the burning of a heretic at the stake. No it isn't. There is no stake. And the text doesn't say he was convicted of being a heretic. It says he was to be killed for "rais[ing] contentions among my people." Even when the priests present him to the king they say that the accusations are that he has been saying bad things about the king. Heresy? Not really. 38 minutes ago, JarMan said: Simply proclaiming this doesn't make it so. You haven't offered any substantive rebuttal. All you've done is show that there were some similarities to fortifications in the 18th/19th Centuries if you search wide and far enough. Except that you don't have to search far and wide. And that is the problem. It is certainly a sufficient rebuttal in terms of the general rules for using parallels that I am aware of. 39 minutes ago, JarMan said: The Book of Mormon doesn't say scripture was corrupted, but taken away. You are changing the meaning of words to mean what you want them to mean in order to support your position. Well then, you and I are simply too far apart on basic readings of the text to get anywhere. 40 minutes ago, JarMan said: This source has a lot of good information: https://www.google.com/books/edition/Rediscovering_Enoch_The_Antediluvian_Pas/2VCuEAAAQBAJ?hl=en&gbpv=0 Yeah ... have you actually read it? I have a copy. Want to know what it says about Grotius? It mentions him exactly once, on page 26: Quote It is in this context, in fact, that Fabricius reprints Syncellus’ excerpts from the Book of the Watchers, in parallel Greek with Latin translation, followed by commentary from scholars like Scaliger, John Ernest Grabe, and Hugo Grotius. That's everything. 44 minutes ago, JarMan said: Scaliger published excerpts in 1606. Grotius apparently published a commentary on it. Except that, as far as we can tell, he never actually did. He certainly didn't publish anything on it. So ... and Scalinger published a relatively small fragment in Greek. Certainly not the whole Book of Enoch. 46 minutes ago, JarMan said: One thing I learned from this is that Enoch was referenced in the NT and by many early church fathers who treated it as scripture. But around the 4th Century is was banned by the church, or at least that was the perception. That narrative fits quite well with "after the book hath gone forth through the hands of the great and abominable church, that there are many plain and precious things taken away from the book..." It is mentioned a lot - because Jude quotes from it. But, most of what we get by the early Church fathers are small bits and pieces. And it really doesn't work because we have to wonder what Grotius thought was taken away in the Book of Enoch - and how this was going to pervert the right way of the Lord: Quote for behold, they have taken away from the gospel of the Lamb many parts which are plain and most precious; and also many covenants of the Lord have they taken away. And all this have they done that they might pervert the right ways of the Lord, that they might blind the eyes and harden the hearts of the children of men. You see, when we are looking at the content, it has to make some sort of coherent sense. It is awfully hard to think that Grotius was considering these statements in 1 Nephi to be about the Book of Enoch when Grotius doesn't tell us anything about it or why it was so central to proper Christian belief. 1
Calm Posted January 20, 2025 Posted January 20, 2025 (edited) 3 hours ago, JarMan said: You can't be burned to death from being beaten by burning sticks. You don’t have to be tied to a stake to be finished off by burning after being beaten and burned by firebrands (as described in the many examples of execution and torture) if you are so badly injured you can’t stand up though. Edited January 20, 2025 by Calm
JarMan Posted January 20, 2025 Author Posted January 20, 2025 41 minutes ago, Benjamin McGuire said: I think that there are a couple of things here - Abinadi was not killed for being a heretic. Mosiah 11:28 tells us: This isn't a charge of heresy. Similarly in 13:1: 19 minutes ago, webbles said: Sure, they aren't 100% identical, but Abinadi's trial and burning also isn't 100% identical to Foxe's stories or Michael Servetus. You are picking and choosing items that you think are more important and diminishing other items. Abinadi was never called a heretic. You think he was a heretic based on how you define a heretic, but he also could be classified an apostate (though he would say that the priests are the apostates). He also could be classified as teaching a completely new religion (with shared scripture, like Judaism and Christianity). Also, an important event in Abinadi's burning is the fact that Noah almost let him go. The priests had to tell Noah that Abinadi had reviled him. So the reason for Abinadi's death isn't his teachings, but that Noah didn't like being reviled. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Certain_accursed_ones_of_no_significance and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_by_burning#Barbary_States,_18th_century for Muslim burning. You guys are both missing the point here. Yes, Abinadi was killed by Noah because Noah hated him. But the pretext for killing him was heresy. "And he said unto him: Abinadi, we have found an accusation against thee, and thou art worthy of death. For thou hast said that God himself should come down among the children of men; and now, for this cause thou shalt be put to death unless thou wilt recall all the words which thou hast spoken evil concerning me and my people." This is an important detail because the same thing happened with Michael Servetus via Calvin. Calvin hated Servetus essentially because Servetus had reviled him. He used the pretext of heresy (the same heresy as Abinadi's btw) to kill him.
webbles Posted January 20, 2025 Posted January 20, 2025 21 minutes ago, JarMan said: You guys are both missing the point here. Yes, Abinadi was killed by Noah because Noah hated him. But the pretext for killing him was heresy. "And he said unto him: Abinadi, we have found an accusation against thee, and thou art worthy of death. For thou hast said that God himself should come down among the children of men; and now, for this cause thou shalt be put to death unless thou wilt recall all the words which thou hast spoken evil concerning me and my people." This is an important detail because the same thing happened with Michael Servetus via Calvin. Calvin hated Servetus essentially because Servetus had reviled him. He used the pretext of heresy (the same heresy as Abinadi's btw) to kill him. Calvin got scared of Michael to the point that he was going to let him free and then his fellows pointed out that Michael had reviled him?
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