Problem with KJV misnaming carried into Book of Mormon and JST?

[_moksha]

I dimly remember a discussion at Fair involving the use of the name Elias (being latinized from the Greek word for the Hebrew name Elijah). Also there is a similar failure to correctly translate Isaiah as well.

Can anyone relate the problem with the KJV failure to translate Isaiah and Elijah properly and how it is reiterated in the Book of Mormon and the JST? Was there more to the controversy than this? Also, what is the apologetic explanation for this?

[_TrashcanMan79]

Also, what is the apologetic explanation for this?

Elias and Elijah at the Kirtland Temple (from Fair wiki)

[_Analytics]

I dimly remember a discussion at Fair involving the use of the name Elias (being latinized from the Greek word for the Hebrew name Elijah). Also there is a similar failure to correctly translate Isaiah as well.

Can anyone relate the problem with the KJV failure to translate Isaiah and Elijah properly and how it is reiterated in the Book of Mormon and the JST? Was there more to the controversy than this? Also, what is the apologetic explanation for this?

Summarizing the general problem with the Isaiah chapters....

Modern scholarship has come to the consensus that some of the Isaiah chapters weren't written by Isaiah, but rather were added alter. They've also discovered several errors in the KJV translation.

In the Book of Mormon, Joseph Smith included the chapters that aren't supposed to be there, didn't fix any of the known errors, but did change several passages that were translated right. Furthermore, the parts that were changed were concentrated around the italicized words, indicating that the person meddling with it was using the KJV.

This analysis was done by David P. Wright, somebody who would have been among what would have been called the September Seven, had his Stake President not been so slow in excommunicating him. Wright is now a tenured professor at Brandeis, the most prestigeous Jewish university in America, where he teaches the Old Testament.

Here is his page, which will give you a flavor of this.

http://members.aol.com/jazzdd/IsaBM1.html

FARMS quibbles with a couple versus that Wright analyzed and really spins the issue from there. If you only read FARMS, you probably won't understand what Wright is claiming and the strength of those claims.

[_moksha]

Also, what is the apologetic explanation for this?

Elias and Elijah at the Kirtland Temple (from Fair wiki)

And so the controversy on this point is that those other than Mormon do not buy into this explanation of a Hebrew with a Latinized form of a Greek name? I bet those doubters would have had no trouble though if Elijah and Bjorn appeared to Joseph Smith!

[_CaliforniaKid]

There was an article on this from the LDS perspective in Dialogue last year:

Brown, Samuel. "The Prophet Elias Puzzle." Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought 39, no. 2 (2006): 1-17.

Basically, Brown presents some really iffy evidence that Joseph Smith was aware that Elias and Elijah were the same person but that he "sought to distill from the figure of Elijah two separate missions, both of which were hinted at in Malachi’s prophecy." In short, Brown's argument is that Joseph takes the New Testament bifurcation of the coming of Elijah ("Elijah" comes as John the Baptist, but later comes in a more literal sense at the Transfiguration) and applies it also to the present dispensation. The former he calls Elias, the latter he calls Elijah. This, supposedly, was an entirely intentional separation. Brown argues that at least one medieval kabbalist made the same kind of separation:

For the occult hermeticists whose worldview was in formed by the al -
chemist Paracelsus and the archetypal, if possibly pseudepigraphical, Her -
mes Trismegistus, Elias was an important figure, referred to specifically by
this Greek name, apparently as a distinct incarnation of Elijah.20 According
to Paracelsus, “The Prophet Elias foretold many things by his cabalistic
numbers.”21 Indeed, [at] the coming of Elias the Artist, . . . there shall be
nothing so occult that it shall not be revealed.”

Brown also suggests that "Ultimately Joseph Smith was not governed by the rules that constrained philologists."

Finally, it's worth pointing out that D&C 76:100 also treats Esaias and Isaiah as separate individuals.

-CK

[_harmony]

Brown also suggests that "Ultimately Joseph Smith was not governed by the rules that constrained philologists."

Joseph was not governed by rules, period. He made it up as he went along. Revelation by the seat of his pants, if you will.

[_moksha]

Is there any reason to believe that there was once a Hebrew Prophet with a Latinized version of a Greek name? What would his parents have been thinking?

[_karl61]

I give five stars to the book American Apocrypha: Essays On the Book of Mormon - edited by Dan Vogel and Brent Lee Metcalfe. Every single essay is great: It looks like the longest essay is called "Isaiah in the Book of Mormon: or Joseph Smith in Isaiah by David P. Wright some of the headings in the essay are: KJV italics and Book of Mormon Isaiah; KJV translation errors retained in the Book of Mormon Isaiah; Disparities with hebrew Language, text and style;the secondary nature of variants in the Book of Mormon Isaiah; Supposed proofs for the antiquity of the Book of Mormon Isaiah. This is a great book and gives essay after essay about very critical issues. I got mine at a real bargain rate on amazon so you might want to check there.