There is no case to be made for a historical Book of Mormon

[_Kishkumen]

Thank you for sharing some of your spiritual autobiography with us, Nightlion!

[_Nevo]

It is true that if things that are wildly improbable and violate our understanding of how things work occur, then that establishes that wildly improbable events that violate our understanding of how things work occur can, in fact, occur.

Agreed. And that was the only point I was making.

What this does not do is establish any particular wildly improbable event that violates our understanding of things work is reasonable to believe happened. Those remain as improbable as ever until such time that evidence in the context if our framework for understanding how the world works materializes to change our opinion.

Yes, of course.

Yes, it would be interesting to know that a person was genuinely dead for several days and came back to life. No, that would not do much of anything to also establish that the Book of Mormon is an ancient document translated with the aid of a deity. Those are extremely different claims.

Yes, they are different claims. Obviously, the fact of Christ's resurrection alone would not establish the historicity of the Book of Mormon.

[_EAllusion]

Yes, they are different claims. Obviously, the fact of Christ's resurrection alone would not establish the historicity of the Book of Mormon.

I don't think it does much of anything to move the ball forward like you were implying. Those two claims have almost nothing to do with one another. The only connective tissue is that they both exist within the broad range of Christian religious traditions and purport to happen by invoking God's mysterious ability to overcome how we know the world ordinarily operates.

It's not hard at all to imagine that every so often, someone who was thought dead in antiquity was, in fact, not dead and later appeared to return from death. We have significantly more recent examples of that very thing happening. The ability to pronounce people accurately dead has improved over time and has been far from perfect in the past. Mistakes happened with some frequency in the pre-modern era. Ostensible resurrection is every easy to imagine. But, that's not claim regarding Jesus rising from the dead, right? Yes, I would agree, but I think that contemplating this can help you get in the mindset of a universe in which resurrection is real.

Instead, we have a more exotic scenario where person was thought to have literally died, and certainly went through an experience that should have killed him. What of that? We know that brain death is a process rather than an exact moment. When people die, their body winds-down rather than shuts off like a switch. Putting on our science-fiction caps, we can imagine a world in which people every once in blue moon undergo brain death, but something special about them is able to reverse the process. They can go much deeper into the process of dying without being actually dead. Those people have the capacity to resurrect.

Let's imagine we wake up in that world. Let's say it's been definitively established that resurrection is a real, albeit extremely rare thing. Let's say, for sake of argument, we can even somehow peer deep into history and know Jesus is one such example. Maybe the only example. That's doubtless an intriguing fact about the world, but there are lots of amazing things that are true about the world that fill us with wonder and awe. A fact about the world that is dazzling doesn't make other dazzling claims plausible.

Now that we inhabit this imaginary world, what does that tell us about what other sorts of things are likely? I propose to you that when it comes to Book of Mormon historicity the answer is effectively no different from nothing.

[_honorentheos]

Saying Jesus rose from the dead establishes the underlying likelihood of supernatural translation of the Book of Mormon as an ancient text is like saying because my phone can take pictures, that means alien abduction stories are plausible. A universe in which at least one religious figure several thousand years ago was clinically dead, but then not, doesn't mean all bets are off and all religious claims become inherently plausible. It just means that people can come back from the dead.

While I don't believe the Book of Mormon is history, I think you misunderstand Nevo. Or at least it seems that you're making a bad argument by attempting to argue the two claims are independent when the Book of Mormon's claims are dependent on the Resurrection of Christ. It matters that the particular religious figure is the same in both instances. As I read Nevo, he's claiming that if one grants the first condition of Christ's resurrection being an actual event, most of the critiques in the OP stop being impossible hurdles because of the newly available explanations. Most of which seem likely to be the same explanation: The atonement theology and understanding of the Christ as conveyed in the Book of Mormon is the most pure, having been revealed directly by God. What historians have gleaned from examining the evidence of history is simply wrong but given enough time and access to correct evidence it will move in the direction of the Book of Mormon. Is it a good argument? No. But it's not equivalent to saying camera phones make the existence of aliens who take people for probing adventures more probable. It's much closer to saying if extraterrestrial spacecraft are discovered, then alien abduction stories become much more plausible. It doesn't make the second point a fact, but that first most improbable point that's now been granted was the heaviest lift to begin with.

[_peacemaker]

Moreover, how can we know that Jesus did rise from the dead? All we know is that some of his followers seem to have believed he rose from the dead.

You should watch youtube videos about the resurrection of Jesus. I recommend William L Craig and N. T. Wright. The resurrection is the only way to explain the rise of the church.

[_peacemaker]

You anti-mormons cannot explain the seal of mulek dating to the 6th century BC.

[_EAllusion]

While I don't believe the Book of Mormon is history, I think you misunderstand Nevo. Or at least it seems that you're making a bad argument by attempting to argue the two claims are independent when the Book of Mormon's claims are dependent on the Resurrection of Christ. It matters that the particular religious figure is the same in both instances. As I read Nevo, he's claiming that if one grants the first condition of Christ's resurrection being an actual event, most of the critiques in the OP stop being impossible hurdles because of the newly available explanations. Most of which seem likely to be the same explanation: The atonement theology and understanding of the Christ as conveyed in the Book of Mormon is the most pure, having been revealed directly by God. What historians have gleaned from examining the evidence of history is simply wrong but given enough time and access to correct evidence it will move in the direction of the Book of Mormon. Is it a good argument? No. But it's not equivalent to saying camera phones make the existence of aliens who take people for probing adventures more probable. It's much closer to saying if extraterrestrial spacecraft are discovered, then alien abduction stories become much more plausible. It doesn't make the second point a fact, but that first step that's now been granted was the hardest one anyway.

Atonement theory attempts to understand the purpose of the execution of Jesus. As it appears in the Book of Mormon, it's anachronistic because it adopts intellectual developments in atonement theory that would be out of place in a proto-Christian mesoamerican society, but track perfectly with the theology of the 19th century American context in which the book appeared. Accepting that Jesus was resurrected doesn't do anything to resolve this. Jesus being resurrected doesn't begin to establish the additional claim that correct ideas of atonement made its way across the globe via divine revelation. That's like saying that because the CIA is involved in secret interrogations, alien abductions too might be real. Rising from the dead is just an entirely different thing from that.

I think the error driving this reasoning is being promiscuous with a sense of, "if one seemingly implausible religious claim is true, why not others too?" More specifically, it turns on the idea that if you can invoke there is a force in the world that we don't understand that makes seemingly impossible things happen, than we can do that with anything. That's true as far as that goes, but that's a deficiency, not a virtue of "supernatural" accounts of the world.

Just because Jesus can rise from the dead, it doesn't follow that Jesus can and likely did transmit atonement theory to pre-Columbian peoples in the same way that just because I can record events in real time and play them back using a device that fits in my pocket, it does not follow that I can and have communicated thoughts telepathically.

It's an error that isn't as likely occur with things we actually think are reasonable to believe.

If you reduce this into merely noting that atonement theory incorporates the idea of Jesus's resurrection, this doesn't help Book of Mormon historicity much at all for the same reason that Jesus existing doesn't help Book of Mormon historicity. There's a perfectly reasonable basis for why a story involving traditional ideas about Jesus showed up in a book in New York in the 19th century that doesn't allow that fact to cause us to prefer a historical hypothesis for its provenance.

[_Themis]

Yes, it does. But I think it makes a solid theological point. If Christianity is true, we cannot rule out the possibility that God would reveal his plan of salvation for the human family to Nephite (and Lamanite) prophets.

I don't think that solves most of the problems. Like the sermon on the mount. Revelation does not explain how the sermon found in the Book of Mormon is essentially a word for word copy of the one found in the Bible.

[_EAllusion]

Moreover, how can we know that Jesus did rise from the dead? All we know is that some of his followers seem to have believed he rose from the dead.

You should watch youtube videos about the resurrection of Jesus. I recommend William L Craig and N. T. Wright. The resurrection is the only way to explain the rise of the church.

See, normally you can point out how William Lane Craig's *ahem* arguments apply to things like the transfiguration of Brigham Young even better than the purported resurrection of Jesus, but faced with a Mormon, they're liable to be all like, "Yeah!"

[_Themis]

But suppose, upon further inspection, you notice that there are complex structures beneath the obvious anachronisms and plagiarism. And the plagiarized texts turn out to form part of a rather sophisticated intertexual project. That wouldn't necessarily make the book any more credible as an ancient text, but it would at least complicate the picture, wouldn't it? After all, we now seem to be dealing with something more than a crude forgery passed off by a 22-year-old con man.

What they fail to do is show any complexity as being improbably done by humans, so you are left with is the Book of Mormon is an obvious fraudulent document.