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From Nuevo, at MDD: But from the articles I've read, it looks like Carmack checks Book of Mormon syntax against databases of tens of thousands of Early Modern English texts and a couple thousand eighteenth-century texts, and then uses a handful of hand-picked 19th-century texts as a control. The re...

leaving pseudobiblical writings far behind in matching early modern archaism . "Ding ding ding! What do have for him Johnny?" Carmack is so close to grasping it. If he thinks it's an archaism, then it is by definition a text later than the period for which these linguistic features were contemporar...

Thanks Agosh. Are you saying it came from private donors even before the FARMS/MI shakeup? The Critical Text Project has been going on since 1988. If the cost of this "vanity press" has averaged $30k per year over that entire time, private donors have now spent over one million dollars on this. Tha...

The problem that even I see with Carmack's claims is that there an obvious alternative hypothesis: Smith tried to imitate King James English but failed through incompetence. Exaggerating what he thought were KJB archaisms, he overshot the mark and produced a bunch of even more archaic archaisms. Th...

To me, it feels like names from the documents Joseph Smith uncovers have a familiar pattern to them. Is there anything striking to you about how Book of Mormon names are constructed? Do you think after seeing a certain sample of names Joseph Smith came up with, that a person could anticipate with r...

Been there done that. But it simply is not possible. Abraham's time far precedes the Hyksos anomaly -- there is no connection or association with Abraham's Egyptian sojourn and the Hyksos takeover. Period. Don't even go there or bother to speculate that disastrous thought. Chronology is firm based ...

This brings me to my point. There is a mental illness called “SCRUPULOSITY” which is kind of like religious OCD. It affects 7% of the population. It makes religion painful. They always feel unworthy and undergo extreme penenance and ritual to find “peace” which never comes. ... ... Scrupulosity is ...

Why bring in Hittite gods to the Egyptian court? That's ludicrous, you'd more likely have Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump play golf together at Mar-a-Lago and Elizabeth Warren serving them sandwiches. Since we're just playing word association games, I'll take Abraham's connection to Arabia via Islam...

Aside from the apologists, isn't there a whole other world of fundamentalist religion teachers at BYU? Those who are cold to lukewarm about the bizarre theories of Mopologetics? I mean lets face it, these guys teach a lot of apostate stuff, even seizing a stolen geography model from the RLDS church...

My hypothesis for his motivation is that it was less religious than it was mercenary. Joseph Smith was seeking to create a tourist destination for travelers taking trips down the Erie Canal. One of the primary goals of this hoax, which would have been an obvious hoax to this target audience, was to...