“The worst religious text I have ever read.”

[I Have Questions]

B.H. Roberts again on the worst religious text ever:


“If from all that has gone before in Part 1, the view be taken that the Book of Mormon is merely of human origin... if it be assumed that he is the author of it, then it could be said there is much internal evidence in the book itself to sustain such a view.
“In the first place there is a certain lack of perspective in the things the book relates as history that points quite clearly to an underdeveloped mind as their origin. The narrative proceeds in characteristic disregard of conditions necessary to its reasonableness, as if it were a tale told by a child, with utter disregard for consistency.”

- Studies of the Book of Mormon, by B.H. Roberts, p. 251

This.

The contents of the book itself give the game away. Which is why apologists want you focussed on the unfalsifiable nature of witness hearsay, rather than contemplating things like why parts of a KJV Bible have been plagiarised, verbatim, including errors that were made in the 17th Century. Or the plot hole of the land that was promised to be kept from all nations for the Nephites, being first settled by Jadeites and then Mulekites.

A book with credible contents would not need witnesses. It would stand on its own merit.

[MG 2.0]

B.H. Roberts again on the worst religious text ever:


“If from all that has gone before in Part 1, the view be taken that the Book of Mormon is merely of human origin... if it be assumed that he is the author of it, then it could be said there is much internal evidence in the book itself to sustain such a view.
“In the first place there is a certain lack of perspective in the things the book relates as history that points quite clearly to an underdeveloped mind as their origin. The narrative proceeds in characteristic disregard of conditions necessary to its reasonableness, as if it were a tale told by a child, with utter disregard for consistency.”

- Studies of the Book of Mormon, by B.H. Roberts, p. 251

This.

The contents of the book itself give the game away. Which is why apologists want you focussed on the unfalsifiable nature of witness hearsay, rather than contemplating things like why parts of a KJV Bible have been plagiarised, verbatim, including errors that were made in the 17th Century. Or the plot hole of the land that was promised to be kept from all nations for the Nephites, being first settled by Jadeites and then Mulekites.

A book with credible contents would not need witnesses. It would stand on its own merit.

I read B.H. Robert's "Studies" years ago. He was looking at all the arguments that had been brought up against the Book of Mormon up to that time. An interesting factoid is that many of these concerns have been either answered partially or completely since that time. I think you folks know that. What is more interesting, however, is that B.H. Roberts lived before many of the Book of Mormon 'evidences' came forth.

Specifically, stylometry analysis and Welch's discovery of chiasmus.

I had to chuckle yesterday when Wang was cut and pasting and cut and pasting and cut and pasting from 'Studies' as though these cut and pastes proved the Book of Mormon to be simply a product of the 19th century.

I responded to a few of his cut and pastes but didn't receive any follow up from him.

Regards,
MG

[Marcus]

B.H. Roberts again on the worst religious text ever:


“If from all that has gone before in Part 1, the view be taken that the Book of Mormon is merely of human origin... if it be assumed that he is the author of it, then it could be said there is much internal evidence in the book itself to sustain such a view.
“In the first place there is a certain lack of perspective in the things the book relates as history that points quite clearly to an underdeveloped mind as their origin. The narrative proceeds in characteristic disregard of conditions necessary to its reasonableness, as if it were a tale told by a child, with utter disregard for consistency.”

- Studies of the Book of Mormon, by B.H. Roberts, p. 251

This.

The contents of the book itself give the game away. Which is why apologists want you focussed on the unfalsifiable nature of witness hearsay, rather than contemplating things like why parts of a KJV Bible have been plagiarised, verbatim, including errors that were made in the 17th Century. Or the plot hole of the land that was promised to be kept from all nations for the Nephites, being first settled by Jadeites and then Mulekites.

A book with credible contents would not need witnesses. It would stand on its own merit.

Exactly. Roberts' comments about Smith's mental state as a young immature person are especially telling.

[I Have Questions]

This.

The contents of the book itself give the game away. Which is why apologists want you focussed on the unfalsifiable nature of witness hearsay, rather than contemplating things like why parts of a KJV Bible have been plagiarised, verbatim, including errors that were made in the 17th Century. Or the plot hole of the land that was promised to be kept from all nations for the Nephites, being first settled by Jadeites and then Mulekites.

A book with credible contents would not need witnesses. It would stand on its own merit.

I read B.H. Robert's "Studies" years ago. He was looking at all the arguments that had been brought up against the Book of Mormon up to that time. An interesting factoid is that many of these concerns have been either answered partially or completely since that time.

No, they haven’t.

B.H. Roberts lived before many of the Book of Mormon 'evidences' came forth.

Specifically, stylometry analysis and Welch's discovery of chiasmus.

You already know that that has been shown to be a bankrupt theory. So why are you bringing it up again?

[Physics Guy]

Whatever B.H. Roberts concluded about the Book of Mormon, apparently it wasn't enough to make a person in his position publicly denounce Mormonism. From his Wikipedia entry, however, the B in B.H. Roberts was for Brigham and he had three wives. It would take an awful lot to make a person in that position publicly denounce Mormonism. From all the descriptions I've seen of his book Studies of the Book of Mormon, what Roberts concluded about the Book of Mormon was more than enough to discourage anyone who doesn't already have strong ties to Mormonism from entering the faith.

I haven't read Roberts's book and I don't plan to read it. The short excerpts that Everybody Wang Chung has posted seemed so damning that I wanted to ask how Roberts himself answered them in his book. I knew that he had in fact remained a professing Mormon for the rest of his life, so I assumed that he had some strong apologetic counterarguments to the criticisms of the Book of Mormon that he expressed as a Devil's Advocate. As I read more online about Studies of the Book of Mormon, however, it became clear that Roberts never did find much of an answer to those devastating critiques. He expressed his critiques cogently, hoping that the divinely inspired leaders of his church would reply with decisive answers that would resolve all concerns, but instead the leaders merely assured Roberts that they believed the Book of Mormon was true.

From what I have read about Studies of the Book of Mormon, it devotes a majority of its pages to the question of how much the Book of Mormon may have been copied from Ethan Smith's 1823 book View of the Hebrews. Current Mormon apologists don't seem worried about View of the Hebrews. They seem to consider this major concern of B.H. Roberts to have been satisfactorily addressed since his time. As far as I can tell, though, the apologetic defence here has only been to argue that the Book of Mormon cannot have literally been copied from View of the Hebrews, in whole or in significant part, because the two books are not quite that similar.

I haven't read View of the Hebrews either, but everything you read about it online today mentions that the ideas in View of the Hebrews were commonplace American notions in the early 1800s. This seems to be the real point, that the idea of ancient Jews somehow coming to the Americas was no stunning revelation in the Book of Mormon. When it first appeared the Book of Mormon was "one of those books" dealing with a popular theme. It was pretty mainstream for the early 1800s speculation about how native Americans were Israelites.

This would seem to have been why Roberts devoted so much space in his book to View of the Hebrews. Roberts seems like someone who might grow up in a religion of the early 22nd century that will be based on one particular superhero movie—and who discovers, "Whoa, there were other superhero movies?" The issue is not line-for-line or scene-for-scene plagiarism. It's the massively deflating discovery that something you thought was really special is actually just a typical example of a genre.

In the preface to Treasure Island, R.L. Stevenson admits that his book is just like all the other pirate stories and that he is trying to get in at the end of the trend. Modern readers all say, "Whoa, there were other pirate stories?"—but Treasure Island was a hit at first precisely because its theme was already well known at the time. Similarly, it seems, the Book of Mormon was a hit when it came out because it addressed the hot topic of American Israelites. By Roberts's day, Mormons had forgotten that the topic had ever even existed apart from the Book of Mormon, and the uniqueness of its basic concept seemed like one of the main reasons to believe that the Book of Mormon could be a revelation from God. Nowadays even Mormon apologists seem to acknowledge that American Israelites were a thing in Smith's day. They shrug as if this obviously isn't important, but imagine growing up thinking that nobody except Joseph Smith had ever suggested such a radical thing, and then discovering that what you thought were miraculously detailed revelations were all just memes from 1820s New England. This seems to be what B.H. Roberts confronted. Whether Joseph Smith ever held View of the Hebrews in his hands is not the main point.

The other thing that B.H. Roberts mainly seems to point out in his book is that the Book of Mormon is just no Treasure Island. Treasure Island obliterated its own genre, turning all other pirate stories before or after into Treasure Island fan fiction, because Treasure Island is one of the most expertly crafted stories ever written. The Book of Mormon reads exactly like something a bumpkin from 1820s New England made up without even thinking much. He was a clever bumpkin but he was no genius and it totally shows. Mormon apologists like to go on about how complex and subtle their Book is, but they're just talking around the huge point that Roberts faced squarely—that the story is childish.

Stylometry and chiasmus are silly arguments in favour of the Book of Mormon; they do not mean at all what apologists would have us believe that they mean. Even if they were significant evidence, though, they would still be slight weights in the scales against the points Roberts made. He may have stayed in the Church—as if he had any choice—but he never found anything to outweigh them.