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The three great epics of Classical antiquity are all very episodic. So are the Gospels and Acts. To clarify my previous posts, pointing out ways in which the Book of Mormon is simpler than a long novel was not meant just to dump on the Book of Mormon as a bad book. As Kishkumen points out, there ar...

Yes, and that made them much easier to compose than a novel. I don’t know how much education their ancient authors would have had, but I’m guessing it might have been less than Smith’s.

The length of the Book of Mormon doesn't seem like a big issue to me. Writing a long coherent novel, with an intricate plot and many vividly realistic characters who grow over time—that's a major intellectual challenge that usually requires years of practice to achieve. Merely writing a long book, o...

Why does either name need an explanation at all? Nephi is from Judges. Lehi is from 2 Maccabees. I didn't know, or at least didn't remember, either of these. Picking obscure Biblical names is a smarter move than just trying to make up Hebrew-sounding names, and I guess if you read the Bible a lot y...

It's true and important that people with different histories experience things differently. It can even extend to elementary perceptions. A lucid conversation in an unfamiliar language sounds like gibberish; you can't even tell where words stop and begin. Someone who does know the language, on the o...

Those recollections claiming to remember the names Nephi and Lehi do make me think that Smith might well have done some cribbing from Spalding. On the other hand I gather that lots of people had notions about ancient Jews populating the Americas. I think that for a long time European Christians coul...

There are so many ways for numbers to seem special. In fact it's probably rare for a number to have nothing special about it. Once, in the taxi from London, Hardy noticed its number, 1729. He must have thought about it a little because he entered the room where Ramanujan lay in bed and, with scarcel...

I just mean that the reasonable non-Mormon doesn't have any particular story about how the Book of Mormon got made. Smith wrote it, or maybe he had help; maybe he used stuff he had read in books, or maybe he heard it or just made it up; maybe he had some fake plates made of lead shingles or maybe ju...

Imagine you’ve grown up with The Lord of the Rings , and then someone tells you it was all made up. Sure, there was Sauron, they say; and yeah, he was defeated and all the orcs disappeared. There were no hobbits, though, and no rangers or riders or Nazgûl. There was no Gandalf and there was no Ring....

If you look closely you can see that that guy is actually the Death Dealer’s more socially adept brother, the Zucchini Skewer Dealer.