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.
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.
