honorentheos wrote:It seemed to me the initial enthusiasm for it being evidence of plagiarism was blunted by time. in my opinion, that was due to the initial reaction misinterpreting what the Late War revealed about the period when the Book of Mormon was being authored in the 19th century. If one took the view that Smith had a copy of The Late War and was quoting from it or using it as a template for the narrative for the Book of Mormon since he and/or Cowdery probably read it at some point possibly as school children, the apologetic response only required showing there is sufficient diversity and divergence of narrative to satisfy a given, questioning reader this wasn't the case. And that appears to be what happened with that line of argument. Apologists made use of Bayes to attempt to settle that point such similarities were not evidence of direct copying.
OTOH, if one saw The Late War as demonstrating what a 19th century attempt at replicating the language of the King James Bible would look like, resulting in many of the grammatic structures and phrasing often claimed by apologetics for the Book of Mormon as evidence of genuine Hebrew authorship, then that was conclusively demonstrated with the initial study and to my knowledge remains unchallenged.
Despite the overreaction to what it could ultimately prove and subsequent cooling off, I believe it deserves far more mentions than it gets these 6 years on for essentially pruning away entire branches of Book of Mormon apologetics even if it didn't prove Smith was copying the Book of Mormon from a 19th century source.
I remember this thread quite well, one of the first when I arrived here. And I am cringing at some of my comments. That's how we learn, though. Or at least it's part of how I learn, by getting taken to the woodshed.
I think TLW is the skeptics version of NHM in some respects. Apologists didn't use Bayes to refute TLW so much as they merely pointed out that the Johnson's didn't know what they were doing. No offense to them, but they did a very amateur job. They had the right idea in attempting to develop a model to demonstrate significance, but just didn't know what they didn't know. As I recall, the Johnson's also weren't so keen on collaborating and sharing data. I believe there were some experts who wanted to work with them to get a proper paper published in a respectable venue, but they weren't playing nice. As seems to happen with a lot of these things (See Dehlin, Kelly, Runnels, McKnight, et al), people get very protective of their little pet project.
) for my current reviewing of a particular part of Harrells book "This is My Doctrine" if that is OK with you....