Another instance of dazzling incompetence from the Interpreters. I don't share the same faith in the Documentary Hypothesis as some here do, but David Bokovoy's strengths as a scholar are undeniable, so they should take his critique seriously, even if he is not a lawyer.
I do think Thompson deserves some credit here for at least taking the Book of Mormon as the conscious product of an agenda and how the scholarship on the Pentateuch could serve as a model or at least an inspiration. I would never claim to have original insights or any influence, but I have wondered on this board several times over the years why believing Mormons hadn't done so (with the exception of Grant Hardy, but his was a literary analysis that didn't get into the historical or philological side of things). On the old board I amused myself in posting a few nugatory examples of what this would look like.
Speaking of amusing:
Brigham Young, for example, who lived most of his life before Wellhausen’s version of the Documentary Hypothesis was settled in 1878, observed that Moses obtained his information from those who went before him and “picked out what he considered necessary” when he compiled his canon.
Oh, that old surly cabinet maker! Nibley surely was right in believing Young to be the greatest genius of the 19th century.
The Documentary Hypothesis is a completely circular argument with very little external evidence to support it. It is built as a response to a number of scholarly assumptions. So there are serious critiques to be made of it, and some have been. The comparative linguistic evidence—not the literary analysis—is the best indication that we are dealing with layers of textual composition (archaic verb forms, for example, which we can establish as earlier because of evidence external to the text). I'm a little taken aback by Bokovoy's confidence in, for example, words like this:
David Bokovoy wrote:“Skeptics of the Documentary Hypothesis observe that none of these alleged source documents exist except in the minds of their hypothesizers” (p. 86).
The fact is these source documents do exist. They appear in the first five books of the Bible. We can see them there today.
No, that is just circular reasoning here. The Documentary Hypothesis is meant to explain discrepancies in the Pentateuch by
positing that this text is made up of separate sources within itself; the evidence for that is deducted from certain assumptions. The deductions may be sound, and the assumptions may be accurate, but if the hypothesis is "this is actually separate sources put together," you can't say that the evidence for the hypothesis is the hypothesis itself. Homeric scholarship, working both as an inspiration to and in response to the Biblical scholarship, took a similar approach to the Iliad and Odyssey, and it came to a dead end until the insights of Milman Parry and Albert Lord. What their insights did was draw the scholarship away from essentially self-referential arguments about the text in determining the poems' composition while still keeping the text central (unlike archaeological approach, which was an approach using external evidence but which generally took the text at face value). I personally think the Documentary Hypothesis is a house of cards, but there hasn't been an equivalent Parry-and-Lord insight to improve on it yet, so it is the best structure on offer right now.
So that is why Bokovoy really nails it here:
Bokovoy wrote:Yet before LDS apologists seek to counter this extensive body of research, it would be best if they first sought to understand it. I suspect simply producing apologetic essays such as this, which make fantastic claims about the implications of recent scholarship, and which misrepresent the DH will ultimately do more harm than good for those trying to maintain religious devotion to LDS scripture.
Yes, if you are going to start from the same assumptions about the text and you follow the deductions made that produce the Documentary Hypothesis, you don't get to pick and choose as is convenient. You can't just focus on the cards at the top level and ignore the bottom level; the cards on the right will fall if those on the left do.
Bokovoy wrote:Instead, I would suggest two possible approaches: 1. Believers such as Thompson could simply ignore the implications of mainstream scholarship and just choose to believe. This would never work for me, but it does for some. 2. Believers such as Thompson could accept these historical views about the Bible and shift their belief paradigms to accommodate the implications of scholarship. It is possible to do, and many believers in a variety of faith communities are able to make that approach work.
I think #2 is incoherent: "believers" in X can't "shift their belief paradigms" in X without changing what X means: they won't still be "believers." We have to acknowledge that this comes at a serious cost. But If they are serious about maintaining belief in X, then they need to make a better theory than the Documentary Hypothesis. Mormon apologetics is responsive and negative (that is, it denies the claims of others but doesn't advance its own claims), not assertive and positive (that is, positing a claim). That is unlike traditional Christian, Jewish, and Islamic apologetics for most of the history of those traditions. Mormon apologists have such a long way to go because they have yet to develop the competency even to understand what they are up against, let alone how to overcome it. That is what David Bokovoy is showing here.
#1 is a safer bet, and I would suggest that until traditional believers get serious about scholarship and building a real tradition of their own that can be taken seriously, they stay with #1. In fact, they already do! Because here is the thing that makes all of this discussion, both the paper and responses, pointless: the New Testament. Whatever the Brass Plates contained, Alma contains quotations from the Gospel of Matthew before Jesus was even born, and most bizarrely contains whole phrases from Paul a good century before he wrote any of his letters, as well as perhaps Revelation (e.g. have a look at Alma 5). If we are going to start tackling textual anachronisms, let's start with that. If you can't explain that, then no amount of parsing any "E" or whatever sources is going to matter one damn bit.