Book of Mormon Borrowings from the New Testament

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_Roger
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Re: Book of Mormon Borrowings from the New Testament

Post by _Roger »

Hi vessr:

I find this topic very interesting so I would appreciate seeing whatever data you've accumulated. Perhaps you could post some of what you consider to be the best "hits."

I should confess to having ulterior motives, however. Having studied this question a bit, I have come to the conclusion that the Spalding/Rigdon theory best explains the Book of Mormon and there is a set of parallels that is a key element to my so concluding. If we can come up with some at least minimally subjective method for evaluating parallels, then it might be fun to test the method on the parallels I have in mind.

I would be pleased to send each or either of you the set of 500 parallelisms that I am alleging.


I've seen Sandra Tanner's list. Is it comparable to her's?

I will have to refresh my memory (or maybe someone knows this and can share it) but I really think that the top LDS apologists concede that material has been borrowed from the KJV Bible in places. I don't think that's really controversial. If I remember right, the explanation is that Joseph realized that Nephi (or whoever) was quoting from the Bible, so to save time, he just copied certain verses from the Bible. It's important that we can all agree on that as a starting point. In other words, I don't think it's a problem for LDS thinkers to concede that in cases where the Book of Mormon is quoting an Old Testament prophet, for example, Joseph could have used a Bible to copy those verses instead of using the stone. Now if I'm right about that, then for me, anyway, that's a big concession, but LDS apologists would obviously disagree, so I'll need to verify whether they concede that much or not.

Dan Vogel and I and marg had a knock-down, drag-out debate over that a year or two ago. I know Vogel has no problem with Joseph copying certain verses from the KJV, but he actually thinks Oliver Cowdery did the copying per Joseph's instructions. Dan is also not a Mormon, but I found his trust in the Book of Mormon witnesses to be very LDS-friendly.

We may need to look up those old threads.

I picked out three for Brad earlier, and I believe Brad was impressed with two out of the three. Maybe one of you can provide an object methodology for determining whether a parallelism has occurred and how sequences within a parallelism could be determined.


In this case, what I mean by sequences is: In what sequence do you find the parallels? So let's say you have

a
b
c
x

in the KJV and you think you have four corresponding parallels in the Book of Mormon

aa
bb
cc
xx

My question would be, do the pairings follow a logical sequence? So for example...

a pairs with aa
b pairs with bb
c pairs with cc
x pairs with xx

and both sets appear in the text in the same sequence. That to me is significant. You could still have the same parallels but it could be that in the Book of Mormon you find aa occurring after cc and bb occurring last and xx occurring first. That to me weakens the alleged connection.

On the other hand, even that is not fool-proof because let's say Joseph is intentionally borrowing from some source but doesn't want it to be obvious that he's borrowing. In that case, if he's smart, he's going to make every effort to mix things up, in which case there may not be a parallel sequence by design. But, if we do see parallels and some of those parallels also follow a similar sequence, then to me, that becomes a powerful indicator of a connection.

As for the evidence that Smith cribbed from the KJV rather than God, I would propose that, based upon an earnest review of the parallelisms that I’ve produced, there is more evidence that a man made them rather than God, but perhaps we need a methodology for determining that.


Like Brad says, I think that is going to be difficult if not impossible to demonstrate. To me there are plenty of good reasons to believe that God had no part in the entire process, but people who want to believe otherwise are going to find a way to dismiss the evidence. That's why I focus on the errors to settle that question. Pretty much everyone (even TBMs) agree that God would not be responsible for the errors. So where there are errors, we might be able to find evidence for how those errors came to be.
"...a pious lie, you know, has a great deal more influence with an ignorant people than a profane one."

- Sidney Rigdon, as quoted in the Quincy Whig, June 8, 1839, vol 2 #6.
_vessr
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Re: Book of Mormon Borrowings from the New Testament

Post by _vessr »

Roger wrote:Hi vessr:

I find this topic very interesting so I would appreciate seeing whatever data you've accumulated. Perhaps you could post some of what you consider to be the best "hits."

I should confess to having ulterior motives, however. Having studied this question a bit, I have come to the conclusion that the Spalding/Rigdon theory best explains the Book of Mormon and there is a set of parallels that is a key element to my so concluding. If we can come up with some at least minimally subjective method for evaluating parallels, then it might be fun to test the method on the parallels I have in mind.

I would be pleased to send each or either of you the set of 500 parallelisms that I am alleging.


I've seen Sandra Tanner's list. Is it comparable to her's?

I will have to refresh my memory (or maybe someone knows this and can share it) but I really think that the top LDS apologists concede that material has been borrowed from the KJV Bible in places. I don't think that's really controversial. If I remember right, the explanation is that Joseph realized that Nephi (or whoever) was quoting from the Bible, so to save time, he just copied certain verses from the Bible. It's important that we can all agree on that as a starting point. In other words, I don't think it's a problem for LDS thinkers to concede that in cases where the Book of Mormon is quoting an Old Testament prophet, for example, Joseph could have used a Bible to copy those verses instead of using the stone. Now if I'm right about that, then for me, anyway, that's a big concession, but LDS apologists would obviously disagree, so I'll need to verify whether they concede that much or not.

Dan Vogel and I and marg had a knock-down, drag-out debate over that a year or two ago. I know Vogel has no problem with Joseph copying certain verses from the KJV, but he actually thinks Oliver Cowdery did the copying per Joseph's instructions. Dan is also not a Mormon, but I found his trust in the Book of Mormon witnesses to be very LDS-friendly.

We may need to look up those old threads.

I picked out three for Brad earlier, and I believe Brad was impressed with two out of the three. Maybe one of you can provide an object methodology for determining whether a parallelism has occurred and how sequences within a parallelism could be determined.


In this case, what I mean by sequences is: In what sequence do you find the parallels? So let's say you have

a
b
c
x

in the KJV and you think you have four corresponding parallels in the Book of Mormon

aa
bb
cc
xx

My question would be, do the pairings follow a logical sequence? So for example...

a pairs with aa
b pairs with bb
c pairs with cc
x pairs with xx

and both sets appear in the text in the same sequence. That to me is significant. You could still have the same parallels but it could be that in the Book of Mormon you find aa occurring after cc and bb occurring last and xx occurring first. That to me weakens the alleged connection.

On the other hand, even that is not fool-proof because let's say Joseph is intentionally borrowing from some source but doesn't want it to be obvious that he's borrowing. In that case, if he's smart, he's going to make every effort to mix things up, in which case there may not be a parallel sequence by design. But, if we do see parallels and some of those parallels also follow a similar sequence, then to me, that becomes a powerful indicator of a connection.

As for the evidence that Smith cribbed from the KJV rather than God, I would propose that, based upon an earnest review of the parallelisms that I’ve produced, there is more evidence that a man made them rather than God, but perhaps we need a methodology for determining that.


Like Brad says, I think that is going to be difficult if not impossible to demonstrate. To me there are plenty of good reasons to believe that God had no part in the entire process, but people who want to believe otherwise are going to find a way to dismiss the evidence. That's why I focus on the errors to settle that question. Pretty much everyone (even TBMs) agree that God would not be responsible for the errors. So where there are errors, we might be able to find evidence for how those errors came to be.


You wrote, “I find this topic very interesting so I would appreciate seeing whatever data you've accumulated. Perhaps you could post some of what you consider to be the best "hits."”

I will pick out what I consider the best examples and post them.

“You wrote, “I have come to the conclusion that the Spalding/Rigdon theory best explains the Book of Mormon.”

Do you think, therefore, that the parallelisms would have been contributed by Rigdon, rather than Joseph Smith? They do not seem to be derived by any material that might have been copied from Spalding.
In what way do you believe that “there is a set of parallels that is a key element to my so concluding”?
As I will post my top picks for parallels, will you post the parallels you have in mind? That may given us a clearer picture of how to evaluate them or to test the method on the parallesls.

You wrote, “I've seen Sandra Tanner's list. Is it comparable to her's?”

Three things distinguish mine from hers (and her late husband’s I believe):
1: I believe I found more.
2: I string together each set of parallels in a different way.
3. Most of my parallels have never been footnoted in the LDS Church’s standard works. I began to believe, and still do, that there is a bit of a cover-up in this fashion.

Some of the top LDS apologists did concede the copying of certain of the King James verses, including those in Nephi that parallel Isaiah and those in 3 Nephi that parallel Matthew. Those don’t interest me as much as the ones I came up with and I don’t include them in my 500.

Yes, I read most, if not all of the threads that were attached to the debate you referred to and summarized Marg’s and Dan’s position relative to Chandler’s position.

You wrote, “I found [Dan’s] trust in the Book of Mormon witnesses to be very LDS-friendly.”

Perhaps not LDS-friendly as much as helping to establish his theory that Joseph looked in a hat rather than at Spalding or Rigdon material when allegedly doing the translating.

You wrote, “We may need to look up those old threads.”

As I said I looked at those threads and my summary can be reviewed in my thread below titled, “Dan Vogel versus that late Ted Chandler."

I think my sets of parallels reveal that the majority of sets do not appear in any sequence. It’s as if Smith, or Rigdon, took their favorite scriptures from the New Testament and built their Book of Mormon stories around them.

Finally, your handle includes a Rigdon quote: “a pious lie, you know, has a great deal more influence with an ignorant people than a profane one.” I did not find it in the Quincy Whig, but rather in a letter from Rigdon. Do you know the context of the statement? As I recall Rigdon was not accusing himself of Smith as committing pious lies, but rather embittered Christian foes.
_Tobin
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Re: Book of Mormon Borrowings from the New Testament

Post by _Tobin »

vessr,

I believe Brad and I come out at the same place on this topic.

From the Mormon perspective, finding parallels is neither interesting nor insightful. It has been well known since the Book of Mormon was published that many verses in the Book of Mormon paralleled either Isaiah or Matthew. This is completely understandable since God speaks the same to one nation as to another. Finding additional parallels isn't any more interesting than the well-known ones.

And from the Mormon critic perspective, this is also rather uninteresting. The Mormon critic believes Joseph Smith was a fraud. So, of course he copied the Book of Mormon from the Bible and other sources and made up everything else.

The idea of parallels is a self-confirming theory. You can use it however you want and it proves nothing to either side of the debate.
"You lack vision, but I see a place where people get on and off the freeway. On and off, off and on all day, all night.... Tire salons, automobile dealerships and wonderful, wonderful billboards reaching as far as the eye can see. My God, it'll be beautiful." -- Judge Doom
_Res Ipsa
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Re: Book of Mormon Borrowings from the New Testament

Post by _Res Ipsa »

Tobin wrote:vessr,

I believe Brad and I come out at the same place on this topic.

From the Mormon perspective, finding parallels is neither interesting nor insightful. It has been well known since the Book of Mormon was published that many verses in the Book of Mormon paralleled either Isaiah or Matthew. This is completely understandable since God speaks the same to one nation as to another. Finding additional parallels isn't any more interesting than the well-known ones.

And from the Mormon critic perspective, this is also rather uninteresting. The Mormon critic believes Joseph Smith was a fraud. So, of course he copied the Book of Mormon from the Bible and other sources and made up everything else.

The idea of parallels is a self-confirming theory. You can use it however you want and it proves nothing to either side of the debate.


It's interesting to me that Tobin and I get to a similar place from such different starting points. :smile: And just so we all know where each other starts from, I don't believe in the existence of any sort of god. So, for me, it's just an interesting exercise in evidence to assume the existence of a God and then try to figure out the value of textual parallels as evidence. I don't have anything riding on the outcome.

I'm going to beg off for tonight because I have a hideous head cold and need some sleep. Vessr, I don't want to say I won't read your parallels, but they won't help me at this point in the discussion. I know I looked at three, but I do think we need to formulate some sort of criteria before going through them. Maybe I could pull some generalizations from why I thought the second two were stronger than the first. **shrugs**

Roger, if you think it would help me in the discussion to read the older thread, I'm happy to do that. It sounds like you've given a great deal of thought on the issue of parallelism. You may be right about what most apologists would say about the chapters of Isaiah incorporated into the Book of Mormon. If I were an apologist, I'm not sure I'd concede that point. Maybe God really, really likes the KJV translation of Isaiah. :mrgreen:

I'll puzzle on the rest of your post tomorrow and see if I can respond in a somewhat coherent manner. :lol:
​“The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists.”

― Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 1951
_vessr
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Re: Book of Mormon Borrowings from the New Testament

Post by _vessr »

Brad, hope you feel better in the morning. I have 150 parallels cut and ready to paste when we define some parameters. I wondered if the sequencing issue could be resolved this way:

A + B + C + D. etc. = A + B + C + D, etc.

where A, B, C and D, etc. are words in the Book of Mormon that are reflected in exactly or nearly exactly the same order in the New Testament. For example:

1. 1 Nephi 1:14: “Great and marvelous are thy works, O Lord God Almighty”; “Great and marvellous are thy works, Lord God Almighty”: Revelation 15:3.

Great (A) plus marvelous (B) plus works (C) plus Lord God Almighty (D) = Great (A) plus marvellous (B) plus works (C) plus Lord God Almighty (D)

So in this example we have not only the same exclamation on each side of the equation, but also the exact order of words on each side.
_Roger
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Re: Book of Mormon Borrowings from the New Testament

Post by _Roger »

This could be a good mix of perspectives. My frustration in the past with similar discussions is that, IMHO, people are too invested in their own pet theory to give another perspective an honest look. I'm guilty of that myself at times, but I try to have an open mind while still defending my own point of view. I like the fact that we're each coming at this from a different angle.

Brad wrote:And just so we all know where each other starts from, I don't believe in the existence of any sort of god. So, for me, it's just an interesting exercise in evidence to assume the existence of a God and then try to figure out the value of textual parallels as evidence. I don't have anything riding on the outcome.


I'm glad to hear that, Brad. I think that's a perfect fit for this. You don't have an agenda or a horse in the race, so you can approach this with an open mind. You're apparently an atheist, but not militantly so. You can postulate what things might be like if there is a God. I think that's great.

By the way, why the interest in Mormonism? My story is that they tried to convert me back in 2001 which started me on a quest to find out more about Joseph Smith and the history of Mormonism, which is still ongoing. The only problem (from their perspective) is that my "investigation" of Mormonism backfired and has produced a Joseph Smith critic.

Brad wrote:Roger, if you think it would help me in the discussion to read the older thread, I'm happy to do that. It sounds like you've given a great deal of thought on the issue of parallelism. You may be right about what most apologists would say about the chapters of Isaiah incorporated into the Book of Mormon. If I were an apologist, I'm not sure I'd concede that point. Maybe God really, really likes the KJV translation of Isaiah.


The old threads are (as Joseph Smith would say) "exceeding long." You can read them if you have a lot of free time! I would have to look them up. Can't even remember the titles right now.

I've given some thought to the issue, yes, but, like you I'm pretty much stumped as to how to translate the data into objective conclusions. I have an opinion, because of the evidence I've seen, and I think it's a reasonable opinion, but who's to say? It will be good to see how your opinions progress as the discussion progresses - especially because you seem to be genuinely skeptical about parallels to begin with.

Perhaps Tobin or another TBM can give us the apologist's perspective. I realize that's a blanket statement and there is likely a wide variety of opinion even in the acceptable LDS apologist range. It would be great if Don Bradley or Nevo would discover the thread and offer that perspective.

Yes, I think you are probably right. It seems unlikely that an LDS apologist would be comfortable conceding that Joseph copied from the KJV even on the obvious quotation sections. I might not be remembering that correctly. Maybe I am confusing Vogel's position with that of an LDS apologist. But I think I remember someone - maybe Peterson? - conceding the point.

Anyway, I look forward to hearing your point of view. Hope you feel better tomorrow.

All the best.
"...a pious lie, you know, has a great deal more influence with an ignorant people than a profane one."

- Sidney Rigdon, as quoted in the Quincy Whig, June 8, 1839, vol 2 #6.
_Roger
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Re: Book of Mormon Borrowings from the New Testament

Post by _Roger »

vessr:

Do you think, therefore, that the parallelisms would have been contributed by Rigdon, rather than Joseph Smith? They do not seem to be derived by any material that might have been copied from Spalding.


Yes, I agree. You seem to be up on your S/R theory. My own opinion is that Rigdon would likely have supplied the majority of the scripture portions of the Book of Mormon (as opposed to the historical narrative, which I see as coming mostly from Spalding and Smith) so parallels with the KJVB would likely have been produced by Rigdon. I'm sure there's overlap, though.

On the other hand, there are other parallels discovered by Vernal Holly between Spalding's extant manuscript and the Book of Mormon. Those parallels are exclusively in the historical narrative portions, mainly Alma and Helaman.

If you're not really up on your S/R theory, this is where things get really confusing. There is an extant Spalding manuscript sitting in Oberlin College in Ohio. While it is written by Spalding, it is not the manuscript that Spalding theorists believe was the manuscript Rigdon presented to Smith and was used as the basis for the Book of Mormon. S/R theorists believe there was a second Spalding manuscript that is no longer extant. And while it is a weakness that we don't have that manuscript, there are good reasons for believing it did exist at one point. (When TBMs learn about this, they love the irony of me challenging the Book of Mormon on the basis that there are no golden plates, while my own belief is that the manuscript that was used to create the Book of Mormon is also no longer extant. I'll grant them the irony, but there are much better reasons for believing the Spalding manuscript existed than there are that any golden plates actually existed.)

Dale Broadhurst - who might want to jump in on this discussion at some point - has a fairly clear idea of how various books might be attributed to which author. It's been a while since I've looked at this, so I'm rusty. But I know that Dale is convinced that the last third of Alma is almost entirely Spalding.

In what way do you believe that “there is a set of parallels that is a key element to my so concluding”?


Well if you read some of the older threads, then you may have already encountered them. I'd rather not bring them up here until we agree on some sort of standard to judge parallels, if that's possible. And I'd like to see what Brad thinks of them at that point.

As I will post my top picks for parallels, will you post the parallels you have in mind? That may given us a clearer picture of how to evaluate them or to test the method on the parallesls.


Yes, but again, I'd like to use Brad as a Guinea Pig if he's game! : )

You wrote, “I've seen Sandra Tanner's list. Is it comparable to her's?”

Three things distinguish mine from hers (and her late husband’s I believe):
1: I believe I found more.
2: I string together each set of parallels in a different way.
3. Most of my parallels have never been footnoted in the LDS Church’s standard works. I began to believe, and still do, that there is a bit of a cover-up in this fashion.


Interesting!

Some of the top LDS apologists did concede the copying of certain of the King James verses, including those in Nephi that parallel Isaiah and those in 3 Nephi that parallel Matthew. Those don’t interest me as much as the ones I came up with and I don’t include them in my 500.


Okay, but from my perspective - and this is the point I was attempting to make with Dan Vogel to no avail - once you concede that there is an open Bible as a part of the process of producing the Book of Mormon, it's a very short step from that to copying from other sources. Vogel totally disagrees on that, but I really think he's wrong. IMHO he puts way too much trust in the testimony of early Mormons - especially Oliver Cowdery. My point was: If they didn't mention that a Bible was used, then how can we know that nothing else was used? Vogel's response was essentially that they didn't mention the Bible because it was not a big deal to them. They didn't think anything about it. They wouldn't have seen it as being contradictory to the testimony that God was providing all the words in the stone. I think that is placing way too much blind faith in the early followers of Joseph Smith.

Yes, I read most, if not all of the threads that were attached to the debate you referred to and summarized Marg’s and Dan’s position relative to Chandler’s position.

You wrote, “I found [Dan’s] trust in the Book of Mormon witnesses to be very LDS-friendly.”

Perhaps not LDS-friendly as much as helping to establish his theory that Joseph looked in a hat rather than at Spalding or Rigdon material when allegedly doing the translating.

You wrote, “We may need to look up those old threads.”

As I said I looked at those threads and my summary can be reviewed in my thread below titled, “Dan Vogel versus that late Ted Chandler."


I will probably need to check out that thread at some point.

It's a fascinating dynamic. Vogel thinks Joseph Smith was a con-man (but a pious one, whatever that is) and that his followers were all simple dupes who had no clue they were being conned. So no one but Joseph Smith really knew what was going on. Vogel thinks this is what accounts for Whitmer's testimony and Emma's and Martin Harris, etc. They all testified the way they did, because they really believed Joseph was putting his head in his hat and reading off words.

Well Vogel may be right about that to a certain extent, but I think he takes the witnesses' word too uncritically. My own point of view is that some of them may have been dupes but that a cult-like mentality was operating that caused them to greatly enhance and embellish their own testimony and to "forget" details that might not fit well into the divine narrative they were developing around the persona of Smith-as-prophet - like the fact that a KJV Bible was used.

So if Vogel is right, the question is how would Joseph have pulled this off? Specifically how would he have produced the Book of Mormon without his followers figuring out the con? His answer, I think, is that Joseph was able to use some sort of automatic writing. This, to me, is a stretch. It's pretty close to supernatural. (Which is why I tend to think of it as rather LDS-friendly). I think a better explanation - that is if we're going to run with Vogel's idea of one con-man working alone and a bunch of dupes - is that Joseph had some form of a photographic memory, or at least had the ability to memorize large chunks of material in a short time.

Now... you have to keep in mind that I'm going off of Vogel's ideas at this point, not my own. In other words, Vogel's best explanation of the phenomenon as he sees the data is "automatic writing." I say, even with his interpretation, "photographic memory" is less of a stretch.

Either way, though, LDS love it because it's pretty darn close to simply gazing in a seer stone and sorting the rest out in his mind.

Bottom line is we just don't know how it was done. (And LDS love that too) but the fact is, they don't know either. They postulate God, but as I pointed out earlier, when you press them on that, they postulate just enough of God's input to still allow for the "by the gift and power of God" attribution, and not so much to be able to blame God for the numerous mistakes. That, to me, is very weak.

My belief is that some of it was done by Joseph putting his head in his hat and rattling off sentences - I think he was indeed fairly good at that and already had years of practice even before the Book of Mormon manuscript came along - but that much of it was done off-site, out of public view where no seer-stone show was necessary.

I think my sets of parallels reveal that the majority of sets do not appear in any sequence. It’s as if Smith, or Rigdon, took their favorite scriptures from the New Testament and built their Book of Mormon stories around them.


Well the S/R theory would suggest that Rigdon indefinitely borrowed a manuscript that was originally written by Spalding, who had died by the time Rigdon got a hold of it. So Rigdon sort of adopts it as his own baby and for a number of years adds a lot of religious elements to it. Then at some point down the road, he hands it over to Smith to bring forth through his seer stone. I think Smith could have added his own elements at that point, and likely did. So the end result is a hodge-podge, especially when you consider the loss of the original 116 pages.

Finally, your handle includes a Rigdon quote: “a pious lie, you know, has a great deal more influence with an ignorant people than a profane one.” I did not find it in the Quincy Whig, but rather in a letter from Rigdon. Do you know the context of the statement? As I recall Rigdon was not accusing himself of Smith as committing pious lies, but rather embittered Christian foes.


Yes, it was a letter to the editor of the Quincy Whig (or at least was published by the Quincy Whig). Rigdon was responding to Matilda Spalding. It's a bit complicated, and again, I'm a bit rusty, but Matilda Spalding (Spalding's widow) had been contacted by some newspaper guys in 1830-something. They interviewed her and in that interview she implicated Rigdon as having stolen her late husband's manuscript. When Rigdon get's wind of it, he responds in typical Rigdon fashion with an angry tirade in the Quincy Whig. The context of the quote is that Rigdon is suggesting that Spalding and his widow had committed "a pious lie." He was attacking Spalding for producing this manuscript with made-up characters about the "ancient inhabitants of this continent." As in: fiction. But Rigdon was alleging that the whole thing was a "pious lie" in order to make money. Rigdon was also subtlely noting the irony that Spalding was an ex-preacher that had apparently become an agnostic or an atheist. The thing is, Spalding never claimed it was the truth, although he did write it as though it were an actual history, but if you read the quotes from those who heard it, there is no attempt to hide the fact that the story is fiction. They simply try to make the point that the fiction is so good (and so amusing) that people might believe it is a true history. In any event, Spalding did want to make money on it, but never did.
"...a pious lie, you know, has a great deal more influence with an ignorant people than a profane one."

- Sidney Rigdon, as quoted in the Quincy Whig, June 8, 1839, vol 2 #6.
_marg
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Re: Book of Mormon Borrowings from the New Testament

Post by _marg »

Tobin wrote:Hi marg,

I think you are missing the point. One of the chief criticisms aimed at the Book of Mormon is that it is not perfect. Fundamentalists like LittleNipper don't believe in the Book of Mormon because it fails to be a perfect book like they believe the Bible is. Other Mormon critics also make this assumption even if they don't believe in the Bible or God. And if Joseph Smith was not perfect (ie Joseph Smith was God's sock puppet) in how he conveyed, then it must not be scripture. My point was if God can compel us to be perfect in one thing, why doesn't God compel us to be perfect all the time? The answers from LittleNipper is God is just fickle about it. He can force man to perfectly convey the Bible, but nowhere else. Why? Because he's decided not to. I find this view to be patently absurd and it implies that man is just God's toy. God allows us to do evil and then judges us for it, not because we choose to do evil (or good). No, instead God chose to do this to us for his own purposes (and possibly amusement).


First of all ..hi Roger,

Tobin, you are probably right that I may be missing the point. My point though is that if this discussion assumes a God and that God can be perfect or imperfect, be anything one wants it to be ..then the discussion ends up being a matter of faith based assertions not based on facts and can never be resolved.

Roger is not employing an assumption of God in the discussion (from what I can tell) but it seems to me you are. You are invoking God..an imperfect God or God using an imperfect man, but that is an assertion on your part. I have no patience reading posts doing that sort of thing. I would skip them however this discussion as started in the O.P I thought was of some interest to read, not that I want to get involved in it.
_Roger
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Re: Book of Mormon Borrowings from the New Testament

Post by _Roger »

I've got to move on to other things tonight, but just wanted to respond to this from Brad first:

So the fact that the Book of Mormon does emulate KJV English tends to lean more toward the Joseph did it, than the God did it explanation. I don't think it breaks down to a simple 50/50 chance. But it gets even more interesting when we consider the errors, which is one of the points I've been making on this thread. How likely is it that God is going to introduce errors into the text? How likely is it that Joseph Smith (or the other humans who helped produce the Book of Mormon) are responsible for any errors? Unless we're postulating a trickster God, I think it's safe to assume the errors come from humans. Agreed?


Sorry, not agreed. Computing odds is meaningless when we aren't dealing with a random process. The number of options available to God compared to Smith is meaningless unless the choices are being made randomly. I'm not saying the odds are 50-50 -- I'm saying it's meaningless to assign odds at all.


Well maybe I'll have to eventually concede that, but I'm still not convinced. We've agreed that the whole thing is subjective but how does that translate into complete meaninglessness? If the odds make one version more likely, then I think that's not meaningless. No? Certainly it's not conclusive, but, I think it does have some value.

Bingo. That seems to be our problem. Because this obviously isn't randomly produced data, there will always be some level of subjectivity in the analysis. Nevertheless, I think it can reach a point where the data becomes compelling. It's sort of like the much ridiculed obscenity statement that went something like: I'm not sure how to define it but I know it when I see it.


You may be right that, at some point, the data becomes at least persuasive. But what is that point? If I rule out God as a possible source of the Book of Mormon, then I'm persuaded that Smith copied at least some sections of the Book of Mormon from the Bible. (All that Isaiah stuff, for example.) But, if God is a possibility, I'm not persuaded the structure of the text can tell us much, if anything.


That's why I factor in the claims made by early Mormons about the way the Book of Mormon allegedly came about. Do you think it is likely that God made errors appear in a stone that Joseph Smith read to his scribes and that's how the errors got into the text?

The problem is, even when we agree on some pre-determined standard, it can always be argued that the standard is arbitrary - especially by those who have an interest in so arguing.


That's why we'd also have to devise some kind of test to see if our standards actually had predictive value.


But we can't get off the ground on that. Hmmm. I hate math and I'm terrible at it, but what if someone could put it into some sort of mathematical equation? Something maybe like what vessr postulates:

A + B + C + D. etc. = A + B + C + D, etc.


?

Again, the subjectivity problem. But what about what I mentioned earlier.... sequence. If vessr comes up with 500 parallels, that's pretty impressive, but a skeptic (or someone who wants to believe that God and Joseph Smith produced the Book of Mormon) could still chalk them all up to chance. But what if within that large group, he found a set of, let's say 5 parallels that follow a similar or identical sequence. What then?


I'm not sure I'm following. I don't know whether 500 parallels is impressive.

I do know that the human brain is terrible about recognizing randomness and chance in a set of data. Our brains tend to discount the presence of randomness and to impose non-existent patterns on random data. So, the number of parallels tells me absolutely nothing.


I'm rebelling against your use of the word "absolutely." It's too absolute. : )

Seriously though, really? Absolutely nothing? Again, at some point, doesn't an abundance of data that all seems to point in one direction become persuasive? I think surely it must.

As for your hypothetical, what counts as a parallel? What does "similar" sequence mean? And how would it be evidence that Smith cribbed from the KJV as opposed to God cribbing from the KJV?


Okay, Brad... I think you're taking this role too seriously. (Kidding) Okay so let's take this one at a time....

what counts as a parallel?


This has to be somewhat arbitrary, I think, but how about if we just agree on something to start out with... so let's say three exact words in a row in the same sentence is not conclusive enough to be considered a parallel. The minimum for consideration would be four words in the same sequence in the same sentence. If we find parallels with five words in a row or more, then we're really on to something.

Is that reasonable? Stupid? naïve?

What does "similar" sequence mean?


It means less than ideal. Ideal would be an identical sequence. The farther a parallel deviates from an identical sequence, the less persuasive it is (but it can still have meaning).

And how would it be evidence that Smith cribbed from the KJV as opposed to God cribbing from the KJV?


I prefer to leave God out of the equation since that is a wildcard factor. But again, my assumption would be that God is not going to introduce errors into the text and that assumption is supported by early TBM witnesses who do believe in the God factor and were in the same room when this was allegedly happening. If that much can be agreed upon, then any errors we run into are not from God. If that much is true, then there is clear evidence that Joseph (or someone other than God) was cribbing from the KJVB.
Last edited by Guest on Mon Mar 11, 2013 8:30 am, edited 1 time in total.
"...a pious lie, you know, has a great deal more influence with an ignorant people than a profane one."

- Sidney Rigdon, as quoted in the Quincy Whig, June 8, 1839, vol 2 #6.
_Roger
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Re: Book of Mormon Borrowings from the New Testament

Post by _Roger »

marg wrote:First of all ..hi Roger,


Hi marg! Great to hear from you again. Hope all is well.
"...a pious lie, you know, has a great deal more influence with an ignorant people than a profane one."

- Sidney Rigdon, as quoted in the Quincy Whig, June 8, 1839, vol 2 #6.
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