What books did Joseph Smith have access to?

[Pace Nielsen]

P.S. I think Calmoriah's ending question really cuts to the heart of the matter. While our leadership would not approve of people harassing others and their religions and deriding their beliefs, other religious leaders would and do.

[David Waltz]

Hi Richard,

You posted:

>>The Seventh Day Adventists are still here. The JWs are here. The Bahais are here. Survival of a group does not mean that its tenents are correct. Otherwise, only one group would exist today.>>

Me: The SDA

[Calm]

On the other hand, other religions PROMOTE such behavior (i.e. singling out another religion for mockery and/or what-have-you). Or, they high-five their members when they hear stories of how one of the fold taught those Mormons a thing or two about the Bible by lying to them about who they were.

I would alter that just a little to say "some other religious congregations". I have my doubts that there is even one religion or denomination out there where every last segment of its leadership or every individual congregation engages in this manner.

Pace, I think you hit it on the head. Juliann was talking more of the overall community of a certain type of critic and not of rogue individuals when she was discussing the double standard.

[David Waltz]

Hi Cal,

You wrote:

>>Can criticisms that appear to work on a microlevel but contradict each other on a macrolevel to some extent coexist logically?>>

Me: Earlier in this thread I posted a link to thread on ZLMB that presents yet another

[RichardMdBorn]

DW

Me: The SDA

[Calm]

P.S. Trying to stay awake and watch BYU's broadcast of "The Faith of An Observer" (a bio of sorts on Hugh Nibley), at 11:00 PM PDT--if you have not seen this video, you must try and catch it!

Went for the Monday showing (3 PM MT) so my daughter doesnt' kill me for dropping her anime cartoons. Thanks for letting me know.

[noel00]

Watched the program on PC streaming from BYU. Amazing technology today. I wondered while watching how in the future he would be accused by his daughter of molesting her. Dreadful thing to accuse ones father of, and if true even more so.

I watched his reading of the writings on the Egyptian walls and remembered how Ritner treated some of his translations in his JNES paper on the papyri.

[Moon Quaker]

Look at any modern-day charismatic religious leader (e.g., Warren Jeffs, David Koresh, et. al) I don't see how JS is any different. Having a band of devout followers does not equate to truth.

My response to this is simple. Where is David Koresh's church today? Is Warren Jeffs and his followers traveling throughout the world, or even the country, baptizing hundreds of people wherever they go?

After a century-and-a-half of facing every kind of opposition imaginable, the LDS Church is still here and going strong. Not only that, it is here to stay. None of the other "charismatic religious leaders" you can think of (Jim Jones, Charles Manson) can even come close to saying the same thing.

Well there is L. Ron Hubbard and Scientology. There are the JWs. The "test of time" does not prove a thing.

[butsam]

Let's stop the bickering over who bickers with whom.

Do LDS attack non-LDS religions? Sure they do...especially Catholics, but also others.

Stating in the essential First Vision that all of the religions that existed in 1820 were wrong and that Joseph Smith should not join any of them is pretty blatantly sending a message that non-LDS religions are wrong...and if the First Vision is no longer taught in missionary discussions, then that is definitely an error that needs to be corrected.

We shouldn't have to sugar-coat things...the fact that all religions at the time were wrong makes the Restoration necessary...and this should be taught by the missionaries. But is this an attack? It depends on how you look at it...is it an attack when a certain Baptist tells you that all Mormons are going to hell? If you answered yes, then it is also an attack when Mormons tell Baptists, Catholics, etc similarly.

Do non-LDS attack other religions, to include LDS? Sure they do... I am not listing specific examples, but they exist in at least as many ways.

Is either Christlike? No! Still it doesn't make all that any of their religions teach wrong...

So let's stop with the bickering over who is bickering, and get back to the ORIGINAL post.

It hits the nail on the head. Joseph Smith was at least one of the following: a genius, demonically-influenced, or heavenly-inspired...one of the three must be true.

Sam

[RichardMdBorn]

1973 stated this thread by asserting that critics of the LDS assert that

Joseph Smith fabricated all of these works after carefully studying, cover-to-cover, all of the following:

- The King James version of the Bible

- Ethan Smith's "Views of the Hebrews"

- Solomon Spaulding manuscript

- The Apocrypha

- The works of Flavius Josephus

- The complete works of Shakespeare

I asked for support, and he posted

In their book "Mormonism: Shadow or Reality?" Jerald and Sandra Tanner cite examples of lines, words and sentence patterns from Shakesphere which resemble verses in the Book of Mormon. Ed Decker on his "Saints Alive" website makes the same accusation

This does not support your intitial assertion that JS "fabricated all of these works after carefully studying, cover-to-cover, all of the following". One's works can reflect Shakespeare's rhythm WITHOUT having studied closely all of Shakespeare's works. You haven't supported your initial sweeping statement.

Richard

[Mighty Curelom]

To me that he could have dictated a manuscript he composed only in his head is tough to believe. Perhaps he was just a genius.

It's been done. Twice as long, in fact. And just as boring.

Book of Oahspe

Of course, your response will be something like "But THAT book didn't create a religion with 11 million adherents." Yeah. That's true. But there's another book claims over 1 billion adherants called the Koran. If you want to argue that truth lies in numbers, that means Islam is about 100 times more true than Mormonism. So you probably don't want to go down that road.

Incidentally, I find it amusing (as Ave Maria says) that you find it harder to believe that Joseph Smith was a genius than to believe angels came down from heaven, directed him to find some gold plates, then came back down and took the same plates back into heaven.

Is it really that hard to believe that Joseph Smith could have been a talented storyteller? Do you really think angel visitation is more probable than an especially intelligent person? Because speaking from my experience, I've met plenty of smart people, but not very many angels.

[ave maria]

DW

Me: The SDA

[RichardMdBorn]

Hi Ave Maria,

Your Parish sounds impressive. My comment was more about Europe. I assume that at least 150M-200M of the 1Bill come from Europe. Yet, apart from Poland, attendance rates in Europe are very low for RCs (maybe 1%). I suspect that very few French or Italian baptised RCs are RC in any real sense.

Richard

[ave maria]

Hi Ave Maria,

Your Parish sounds impressive. My comment was more about Europe. I assume that at least 150M-200M of the 1Bill come from Europe. Yet, apart from Poland, attendance rates in Europe are very low for RCs (maybe 1%). I suspect that very few French or Italian baptised RCs are RC in any real sense.

Richard

It's difficult to compare Catholicism specifically, or any other religion generally, to the requirements for "activity" assumed by the LDS.

For the faithful Catholic, the only requirement is to attend mass once a year, during the Easter season. Most Catholics, however, attend at least once weekly. It does not necessarily make them "unfaithful" or "inactive" Catholics to attend less often than that, however.

If I criticized Latter-day Saints for not attending Sacrament Meeting daily (comparing that to daily communicants in Catholic tradition), that would likewise be unfair.

It's my understanding that membership numbers for Catholics worldwide generally come from parish registrations--that is, faithful Catholics who register at local parishes. Those numbers are then passed on to the local dioceses (like a stake, only generally somewhat larger), and then used together for total numbers.

[Bertram]

In my "short" lifetime I am well aware of a "large" church who did huge "missionary work" in deprived countries but "fed", "clothed" "schooled" and provided "medicinal" help ONLY after the "other" religionists joined their church!

Have things somehow changed in the meantine?

If so I am really glad to see they have joined the human race!

[Dunamis]

This thread has veered crazily off-topic. Please, all posters stick to the topic even if baited to do otherwise. Comparing LDS leaders (or leaders of other faiths) to criminals, Koresh, etc. will not be tolerated. Discuss the issues.

Ave Maria, be warned to stop constantly picking nits, making ***-for-tat posts and one-liner off-topic questions. Stay on topic.

[juliann]

To me that he could have dictated a manuscript he composed only in his head is tough to believe. Perhaps he was just a genius.

It's been done. Twice as long, in fact. And just as boring.

Book of Oahspe

Impressive....reminds me of the gnostic cosmologies. But I see nothing here but cosmology. Find us a book the size of the BOM that purports to be an authentic rendition of a group of inhabitants in an area and time the author had never visited.

Is it really that hard to believe that Joseph Smith could have been a talented storyteller? 

No. I'm sure he was. That still does not explain the text of the BOM. It is only an excuse to avoid the text itself.

[juliann]

Over at ZLMB (see: http://p080.ezboard.com/fpacumenispagesfrm...start=1&stop=20 ), another book has been suggested and needs to be added to the list:

Josiah Priest's American Antiquities.

Josiah Priest wrote the most disgusting book justifying slavery that I have seen....and it was a runaway best seller. I guess that one wasn't in JS's local library.

[rameumptom]

To me that he could have dictated a manuscript he composed only in his head is tough to believe. Perhaps he was just a genius.

It's been done. Twice as long, in fact. And just as boring.

Book of Oahspe

Impressive....reminds me of the gnostic cosmologies. But I see nothing here but cosmology. Find us a book the size of the BOM that purports to be an authentic rendition of a group of inhabitants in an area and time the author had never visited.

Is it really that hard to believe that Joseph Smith could have been a talented storyteller? 

No. I'm sure he was. That still does not explain the text of the BOM. It is only an excuse to avoid the text itself.

Juliann hits it on the nose. Joseph could have been a very intelligent story teller, but then how do we explain all of the "direct hits" he had on ancient things? Especially when many of those things were not known in his day? As I wrote earlier in this thread, he would have had to have access to the Bar Kokhba letters, many of the Dead Sea Scrolls, and Egyptian hieroglyphic primer, and literally dozens of other ancient books. Most were not available in the United States, many were not available anywhere in the world until the 20th century.

So, just how does a genius story teller come up with such impressive guess work? It is one thing for a genius to sit down and write something from scratch with no changes about contemporary issues or things he knows. It is another thing to develop a cosmology of ancient things that no one has a clue about for another century or more.

So, looking at a 500 page book and saying a genius story teller wrote it, does not do justice to the Book of Mormon and Joseph Smith. Had he only used standard Biblical names, standard practices and rituals known in the Bible, avoided Wisdom literature issues, kept the thread of on going events two-dimensional, wrote a text that covered all of the Americas instead of a limited geography, etc; THEN we could all agree he wrote some wonderful 19th century fiction.

And it is a person in denial that does not honestlylook at all the variables before making such an easy statement of Joseph's "genius fraud."

[charity]

Mighty Curelom, (I see that Rameumpton has written essentialy what I have said, but he/she posted while I was writing, and I don't want what I just labored on to go for nothing, so please bear with the repetition )

The Book of Mormon is quite a ways beyond a whopping good story. Talented story tellers write things like "Gone With the Wind" and "Lord of the Rings." But GWTW was about a time and place that had existed in the real world, and that Margaret Mitchell was intimately acquatined with. LOTR was written about a fictional setting which has no real world referent which Jane Chance never will be called upon to verify.

Joseph Smith, if he were the author, would have had to construct the great story about a real world place that he had never been to, with a real cultural setting that was unknown, in totality, to no one else. There were trading practices, warfare styles, governmental types, and so on, which were not only unknown to a frontier farm boy, but not even to scholars at the time. This means he correctly guessed right on hundreds, or even thousands of these real facts?

I am not a statistician, but I do know that while one event may have a certin statistical probability, when combinations of things occur the odds get higher and higher rapidly. The odds that he guessed right about writing on metal plates + Alma as a male name + tumbago + barley + Nahom. . . You get the idea.

And doesn't that also apply to the number of source materials Joseph Smith would have had to access to a write the Book of Mormon on his own, even if the information were available in printed form? Besides the King James Bible, which we know the family possessed, there was the long list of printed materials which may have been available in some place to some people, but for them all to come together in one place to one man? "View of the Hebrews" + Spaulding + Popol Vuh + Sahagun + . . . Gets a little ridiculous, in my mind.

I think the stickler for many people, is that angelic visitation is off the radar. Since they will never accept that, there has to be another explanation, no matter how statistically unlikely. But when one fights against the truth, whatever else they come up with is going to end up looking silly at best, or stubbornly stupid at worst.

[juliann]

I think the stickler for many people, is that angelic visitation is off the radar. Since they will never accept that, there has to be another explanation, no matter how statistically unlikely. But when one fights against the truth, whatever else they come up with is going to end up looking silly at best, or stubbornly stupid at worst.

This is the situation the hard-core critics are putting themselves in by refusing to deal with the text. They are becoming little more than noisy picketers outside the halls of academia. I attended a lecture by Skousen relating the textual criticism findings on the newly found scribal manuscripts...the lecture was hosted by Claremont Graduate University. Nobody hooted, nobody asked stupid questions or started up about "plagiarism", or story-telling, or any of that. And not one of them had to accept angels or anything supernatural at all. They still could talk about the transmission of the text. That is why we have self-proclaimed "liberal" critics siding off with fundamentalists to make videos. That is where this nonsense belongs and will stay.

[cinepro]

After a century-and-a-half of facing every kind of opposition imaginable, the LDS Church is still here and going strong. Not only that, it is here to stay. None of the other "charismatic religious leaders" you can think of (Jim Jones, Charles Manson) can even come close to saying the same thing.

What about the Seventh-Day Adventists (Ellen White), the Jehovah's Witnesses (Charles Taze Russell), the Christian Scientists (Mary Baker Eddy), the Scientologists (L. Ron Hubbard), and Pentacostalism (Charles Fox Parham, with over 200,000,000 members!)?

These are all new religious movements founded in the last 150 years that have had success equal to or greater than the CoJCoLdS.

So now you can tell us how the Lord's "true" Church will actually be small, and "many are called, but few are chosen", and only a few will stand in the last days...

Either way, you need to have a faith-promoting response to the idea that the Church is "successful", but also a faith promoting response to the idea that the Church has hardly been convincing to more than .025% of the world's population. Stone rolling forth indeed.

I couldn't agree more. But to simply dismiss Joseph Smith as another David Koresh or Jim Jones isn't going to stop the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints from growing and expanding.

No. That will probably happen regardless of what is said about Joseph Smith on the FAIR forum.

Does anybody know of a historical example of a book similar to the Book of Mormon being composed by any other single genius?

While not an identical situation, you should read up on the fascinating story of Patience Worth.

So we have a dog's breakfast of reasons why JS made it all up.

I think the approach taken by many apologists and critics is flawed when it comes to the Book of Mormon.

To put it simply, the only thing that needs to be explained is "The Book of Mormon". The actual "text" of the book. And the question is:

Where did it (probably) come from?

Some of the responses...

- It was translated by the "power of God"

- It is solely a product of the 19th century

- There is not enough data. We just don't know.

Now, to an LDS, the preferable approach is to present only the first two options in a false dilema. "Either the Book of Mormon is from God, or Joseph Smith made it up." Then, you just give some reason why Joseph Smith couldn't have "made it up", and you have just logically proven it came from God! But is that really good proof and reasoning? I don't think so, and the critics easily see this, and remain unconvinced.

But then you have the critics, who do what appears to be the exact opposite. They present some reason it couldn't be "from God", so, therefore, it is a product of the 19th century. Is that good logic and reasoning? No, and the believers easily see this, and remain unconvinced.

But what if we look at this situation from a less heated point of view? What is[/] the "logical" approach?

I would suggest the logical approach would approximate the scientific method, or something like this:

-Formulate a theory regarding the origin of the Book of Mormon text

-Test that theory against the data

-Think of ways in which the theory could be "tested" and "falsified" (not "truthified")

-If the theory is tested and falsified, try another theory.

-Reserve judgement until an adequate theory has been found.

In the process, it can be tempting to chose your side, and try to cheat by changing the "theory" under consideration while you are supposed to be "testing" it. This would be the "dog's breakfast" approach referred to by juliann. I agree this isn't convincing. But unfortunately, I find the the same thing being done by believers. Once you get beyond the cliches and non-answers that involve meaningless, undefined phrases like "the power of God", and silly suppositions about God hiding evidence "to try our Faith", there is a hodge-podge of contradictory theories that are most convincing when used as footnotes in a Gospel Doctrine class, not as the foundation of a real theory.

Simply put, the believers have yet to put forth a convincing "theory of Book of Mormon origins" that is consistent, let alone falsifiable. Just consider the question "was the Book of Mormon translation "loose", or "tight"? This would be a basic question to answer before trying to formulate and test a theory about the text of the Book of Mormon, yet there is hardly any sort of agreement among believers on the issue.

I'll also acknowledge the futility of any sort of logical approach towards a question for which "God did it" is accepted as an answer. Once you allow God into the equation, the phrase "God did it" can be used as a huge can of spackle to cover up even the largest gaps in your theory.

So, to answer the original question, do critics have a solid theory explaining the origin of the Book of Mormon?

No.

And to answer the question that should have also been asked in the first post, do believers have a solid theory explaining the origin of the Book of Mormon?

No.

So what is the reasonable course of action in such a case, where there is no satisfactory (let alone falsifiable) theory? Are we compelled to pick one?

No.

We accept the alternate option. "I don't know". And wait for future developments.

[juliann]

To put it simply, the only thing that needs to be explained is "The Book of Mormon". The actual "text" of the book. And the question is:

Where did it (probably) come from?

Any defenses of a spiritual/supernatural nature are only going to be convincing to believers. There is no way to prove God which is what these kinds of demands are. But this is a red herring since even GAs have said the BOM cannot be proved.

And still not person in how many pages has even broached the idea of looking at the words in the text. I know how angry it makes the gainsayers to be reminded that refusing to get out of the hole of "did God do this" is so out of touch with the academic world that it is placing them further and further out of the mainstream that they want to be in.

[Tchild2]

Juliann wrote:

And still not [no] person in how many pages has even broached the idea of looking at the words in the text.

Cinepro previously wrote:

Just consider the question "was the Book of Mormon translation "loose", or "tight"? This would be a basic question to answer before trying to formulate and test a theory about the text of the Book of Mormon, yet there is hardly any sort of agreement among believers on the issue.

I think Cinepro summed up the difficulty of even "looking at the words in the text". What was the translation process? With so much confusion over the term "horses" as found in the BoM, it seems an endless task to understand what Joseph "translated" vs what was just rummaging around in his own brain. If horses are conclusively found in the Americas during the BoM peoples time frame, will apologists still maintain they were tapirs?

Without knowledge of the translation process to compare against the original documents, we are left with few if any reference points. The debates on word meanings, intentions, nuances etc, breaks down further and further like one of those duplicating fractals that goes on in every direction to infinity.

[juliann]

There is next to nothing written about in the BOM that is radically different from the difficulties scholars are presented with in any ancient text. What is happening with the BOM would be equivalent to scholars huddling around the extant MSS and debating where they came from for a century. They actually read the MSS. Much of the disconnect coming from the scholarly community (of both LDS and nonLDS) is that what the antis do is absolutely foreign to their academic pursuits. You saw some of this in the Library of Congress conference when a non-LDS scholar bristled over Keller's attempt to throw in "authority". Again, if critics cannot come to terms with how scholars operate and analyze texts they are going to talk themselves out of the arena of serious study.