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Very much appreciate this thread, as DrW and others have expressed. Kish's recent observation about "the deification of Jesus [presenting] a problem for largely monotheistic Jews" reminded me of something I read years ago by Melodie Moench Charles . . . . . . when [ancient] Jewish Christians began t...

The wonderful 1834 review of the Book of Mormon by Unitarian Jason Whitman (1799-1848; Harvard, 1825) includes this particularly relevant passage: In a large portion of the community, there is a great degree of ignorance in regard to the geography of the sacred Scriptures, the manners and customs of...

I believe this article stems from a curious assertion about Columbus published by Dr. Daniel C. Peterson in 2002. See my following entry from Mormon Parallels for the details, and for other fun stuff (including Lamanite cannibals, and America as an island). http://www.rickgrunder.com/parallels/mp286...

Wonderful stuff, Dean Robbers! Thank you for this topic and your contribution. You have brought a new question to my mind, as follows . . . Phil Barlow wrote that “. . . ‘and it came to pass’ may be discovered 336 times in the Old Testament, 60 times in the New, but 1,168 times in the Book of Mormon...

Thanks for this thread, Skipper - Overbearing systems affect different people in a wide variety of ways. Some individuals seem to shed the impossible parts like water off a duck's back. Many of us, on the other hand, have suffered, and can relate to thoughts being shared here. I tried to express a b...

A little music is always welcome, Moksha! I also appreciated Philo's remarks about shifting options for apologists, but let me offer a subsequent layer of interpretation which I think is crucial: Some Mormon defenders love to agonize over the improbability of poor, stupid young Smith even finding hi...

Thanks, Philo - I quite liked Alphus and Omegus' Hebrew finds as well (though I'm not personally qualified to evaluate them myself). The OP of this thread asks how apologists might handle things like this. Regarding Walker's Dictionary , which I first noticed in the 1980s, someone at FairMormon (now...

I'm no scholar of ancient languages, but in Walker's Dictionary (many editions, easily available to Joseph Smith), I notice a few Book of Mormon or similar names in the dictionary's section on the "PRONUNCIATION OF GREEK AND LATIN PROPER NAMES," pp. [13]-50: AM´MON (p. 16) E´NOS (p. 27) Gad-i-ta´nus...

I have suggested elsewhere that, to Joseph Smith’s understanding, everything ancient and sacred was Hebrew, of sorts. He conceived Abraham writing Hebrew centuries before that language came into being – and with Egyptian characters, somewhat in harmony, as Joseph would have understood it, with gener...

While I have not yet felt the Spirit in relation to your peninsula, Shulem, I surely agree with you that there was only one Hill Cumorah in Joseph Smith’s mind. The culture in which he lived presumed that great civilizations migrated that far north before being destroyed. In 1819 in Auburn, New York...