Did Joseph Smith plagiarize the KJV in the Book of Mormon?

[Guest]

But to react to the KJV italics even some of the time, Joseph Smith would have needed to consult an actual King James Bible, unless you're going to argue that Joseph Smith had a memory so miraculous that he had memorized not only the text of King James Isaiah, but even its layout on the page.

Is that so, or do the italicized words tend to follow a pattern--at least the italicized words Joseph Smith changed? A long time ago as a young teenager I noticed that many of the italicized words were words that could be dropped and I would still understand the verse. Do the changed words in the Book of Mormon often follow a similar pattern? You may think it amazing if I tell you I can memorize a million numbers until I tell you that the numbers are not random, but are all multiples of 5. Are there any tricks like that which would decrease the effort needed for Joseph to memorize the differences? Just curious ans I don't actually think it was memorization. I just like to be fair where I can.

Ah, that explains your frequent criticism of apologetic arguments!

Some of the italicizations follow patterns discernible in English, but the underlying logic of the italicizations as a whole depends on the Hebrew text. Joseph Smith deleted up to 40% of the italicized words, including some that follow a discernible pattern in English and some that don't. To see which Tvedtnes specifically admits Smith responded to, I'd have to dig up the paper.

Even if the words that Smith intentionally ommitted (which would be more than those Tvedtnes acknowledges) all followed such a pattern, and I'd bet dollars to dimes that they don't, in this scenario, Joseph Smith would have, again, either been gifted with very strange faculties--such that he identified and memorized the patterns of some of the italicizations just by reading the text, or he would have needed to make a particular study of the KJV italicizations and purposely memorized them. In the former case, we would have just the kind of rare intellectual faculties apologists like to deny Smith had. In the latter case, we would have further reason to believe that Smith was, again, intellectually not the kind of young man apologists tend to argue, and also reason to think that all or most italic variants in Book of Mormon Isaiah result from his purposeful tinkering.

Recall also that Book of Mormon Isaiah overwhelmingly follows the text of KJV Isaiah, including many of its erroneous transmissions, poor translations, and idiosyncratic readings. That it varies on c. 40% of the KJV italics--patterned and unpatterned--is only further evidence of its reliance on the KJV, and specifically suggests that the Bible itself, and not merely its memorized or transcribed text, had to be available to Smith as he dictated.

by the way, to be fair...your response was an interesting one, and reflects an accurate understanding of this aspect of memory.

Don

[_the road to hana]

Like I said. Ouija board in a hat.

You obviously have had no experience with a Ouija board. I have. It isn't anything like a seer stone.

You have experience with a seer stone?

No, hana. A Ouija baord! The description of a seer stone, where words appear on a stone is ntohing like the operation of a Ouija board. You accuse me of being condescending, but this savs to me you don't know how a Ouija board works. So, in that case, I will explain.

A Ouija board has an alphabet and the words yes and no. There is something called a planchett. At least two people put their hands on the planchett and it moves of its own volition under their hands to letters to spell out words in response to questions. It can also move to the words yes or no so as not to have to spell them out.

Can you see how that is not the same as looking at a stone?

I know exactly what a Ouija board is. I also know that faithful LDS should have nothing to do with it. I'll assume that your personal experience with it was prior to your 19-year-old conversion to Mormonism.

Now, what personal experience do you have with a seer stone to base a comparison?

[_charity]

I know exactly what a Ouija board is. I also know that faithful LDS should have nothing to do with it. I'll assume that your personal experience with it was prior to your 19-year-old conversion to Mormonism.

Now, what personal experience do you have with a seer stone to base a comparison?

You assume right. I didn't have packs of cigarettes and six-packs to throw in the trash when I converted, but the Ouija board went.

I hope you can understand that you can make comparisons based on knowledge bases not experiential in nature? Let me give a concrete example. I have ridden on a horse. I have never skydived. But I think I can confidently say that the two experiences are different.

[_DonBradley]

Charity,

Wesley P. Walters has identified some 200 anachronistic Book of Mormon quotations from the New Testament. If you absolutely require the full list, I suppose I can scan it and email it to you. But since you don't appear to have read the David P. Wright essay yet, maybe I shouldn't bother? The following are a few from the Tanners:

Yes, but he translated the book from a hat. Difficult to memorize from a hat, right off the top of his head. How do you explain the translation process if Emma and David are correct??

Uhhhhhh, WhyMe? No one said he memorized these quotations while looking in a hat. And it doesn't really matter whether he was looking in a hat or not; what matters is that he was quoting material that was avaiable to him but would not have been available to ancient Nephites....

The white hat is just a red herring.

Don

[_the road to hana]

I know exactly what a Ouija board is. I also know that faithful LDS should have nothing to do with it. I'll assume that your personal experience with it was prior to your 19-year-old conversion to Mormonism.

Now, what personal experience do you have with a seer stone to base a comparison?

You assume right. I didn't have packs of cigarettes and six-packs to throw in the trash when I converted, but the Ouija board went.

I hope you can understand that you can make comparisons based on knowledge bases not experiential in nature? Let me give a concrete example. I have ridden on a horse. I have never skydived. But I think I can confidently say that the two experiences are different.

How many people do you know who've had and documented experiences with seer stones?

[_Mercury]

I know exactly what a Ouija board is. I also know that faithful LDS should have nothing to do with it. I'll assume that your personal experience with it was prior to your 19-year-old conversion to Mormonism.

Now, what personal experience do you have with a seer stone to base a comparison?

You assume right. I didn't have packs of cigarettes and six-packs to throw in the trash when I converted, but the Ouija board went.

I hope you can understand that you can make comparisons based on knowledge bases not experiential in nature? Let me give a concrete example. I have ridden on a horse. I have never skydived. But I think I can confidently say that the two experiences are different.

Why did you throw it away? Joseph Smith probably could have taught you a thing or two about it.

[_DonBradley]

Don, I can't disagree with just about anything you've said here, and I know the Book of Mormon is hokum like you do, but I do have to add one remark in disagreement. A TBM could remark simply that the italics specifically were removed because God didn't like them there (since they'd been added by the translators) and so the version that God revealed to Joseph Smith while he was translating omitted them. I don't buy into this logic, but it's something they could in fact claim, and it wouldn't be entirely illogical, given their particular, faith-clouded logic.

Hi Sethbag,

Such a line of apologetics, like most, would be highly problematic. The italicized words of the KJV were mostly added to communicate in words what the Hebrew could communicate without words--purely through grammar. If you know a foreign language, then you know that it is often the case that a meaning implied by sentence structure or grammatical form in one language requires a word or phrase to communicate in another language. This is frequently the case in translating from Hebrew to English; so, the italicized words are often necessary to make sense of the text in English. Yet the Book of Mormon inconsistently includes or omits the translator-added words, even when the same underlying Hebrew structure is involved, often reducing the text to gobbledygook. It was this fact that forced even Tvedtnes to admit that Joseph Smith purposely deleted some of the italicized words. Subsequent redactors of the book have also implicitly acknowledged that these words were often necessary to the sense of the text: many of them have been re-added to Book of Mormon Isaiah. (Note also that occasionally an italicized word or phrase was added because the underlying Hebrew made little sense to the translators. The changes are not all based on fundamental grammar, though the great majority are.)

That the italicized words were added by the translators is and was common knowledge--and therefore hopefully something even God knew as early as 1829! Assuming that He also still recalled biblical Hebrew (having spoken it quite a bit in days gone by), it's unthinkable that God would bungle His treatment of KJV italics, ommitting them even when they were required by the grammar of the Hebrew and needed to make sense of the text in English. Yet it's quite understandable that someone who, unlike God, had no familiarity with another language would assume that words added by the translators were interpolations into the text, rather than meanings implied in the grammar of the original. Joseph Smith, not God, should be seen as the agent deleting italicized KJV phrases necessary to the sense of the text. This almost certainly means both that Smith had a Bible in front of him as he dictated these texts, and that he tinkered with the KJV italics in order to arrive at a (presumably) purer ancient text, rather than arrive at such a text by reading it from the c. 2400 year old plates in his possession. If he could do the latter, why on earth did he do the former?

Don

[Guest]

No, hana. A Ouija baord! The description of a seer stone, where words appear on a stone is ntohing like the operation of a Ouija board. You accuse me of being condescending, but this savs to me you don't know how a Ouija board works. So, in that case, I will explain.

A Ouija board has an alphabet and the words yes and no. There is something called a planchett. At least two people put their hands on the planchett and it moves of its own volition under their hands to letters to spell out words in response to questions. It can also move to the words yes or no so as not to have to spell them out.

Can you see how that is not the same as looking at a stone?

Ohhh, I get it! The Ouija board doesn't operate like the seerstone, but much like the Liahona and Oliver Cowdery's divinely-endorsed rod, which can point to things and indicate "yes" or "no." That definitely distances Mormonism from non-sacred divinatory practices.

Case closed.

Don

[_Sethbag]

Great answer to my little apologetic argument, Don! I 100% agree with you. I didn't believe that apologetic line, but I did think that some apologist might use it. After reading your response, perhaps they'll think twice.

I totally agree that the Isaiah stuff in the Book of Mormon looks manmade in the sense that a man put it in there, and tinkered with it, and so forth, and not with any Divine help in doing so. It certainly doesn't look like anything Nephi could reasonably have read on Brass Plates which he obtained from Laban before leaving Jerusalem in around 600ish BC and subsequently included in the Book of Mormon.

[_why me]

Charity,

Wesley P. Walters has identified some 200 anachronistic Book of Mormon quotations from the New Testament. If you absolutely require the full list, I suppose I can scan it and email it to you. But since you don't appear to have read the David P. Wright essay yet, maybe I shouldn't bother? The following are a few from the Tanners:

Yes, but he translated the book from a hat. Difficult to memorize from a hat, right off the top of his head. How do you explain the translation process if Emma and David are correct??

Uhhhhhh, WhyMe? No one said he memorized these quotations while looking in a hat. And it doesn't really matter whether he was looking in a hat or not; what matters is that he was quoting material that was avaiable to him but would not have been available to ancient Nephites....

The white hat is just a red herring.

Don

Oh but some critics do claim the hat translation as does Emma. You see, a critic needs to get his or her story straight because a critic has many different interpretations of the Joseph Smith story. For example, the uncle daleites claim that sidney wrote it. It that were the case then Sidney was copying from the Bible. Now other critics have Joseph Smith writing it and then translating it from a hat through a steady stream of consciousness. And others have Joseph Smith just writing it through the use of many souces, and then hiding behind a curtain and translating the book with manuscript in hand.

Which is it? I am sure that there is even more critics interpretations out there. They all can't be right. Fact: when people begin to speculate, the speculations can get out of control and prey on one another.

I still like the hat.