Zub Zool oan and Abraham 1:2b?????3

[_Trevor]

When evidence is produced that undermines the support for that position, suddenly it's unimportant, peripheral, and of little apologetic value. I hope you can appreciate what that kind of shift in emphasis says to me about the critics.

Shift in emphasis by whom? By everyone who does not believe that the Book of Abraham is a legitimate scripture, or by the handful of people who have studied this particular piece of esoteric Mormon trivia? Are you asserting that nobody said the KEP were irrelevant to their non-belief in the Book of Abraham prior to your and/or Schryver's argument?

I know that I, for one, have never argued or believed that the KEP convicted Joseph Smith of fraud. I am interested to find, however, that mak has suddenly identified me as a member of a particular camp in which this is my assigned agenda. He might be surprised to find that I never had such an agenda, and I think he would be hard pressed to demonstrate that his conclusions about my obvious position are fact based.

[_Trevor]

Your argument is completely and totally invalid.

ROFLMAO!!!

Oh brother.

So let's discuss the many occasions on which Joseph and his scribes dictated most of a manuscript and then transcribed the last page. Since mak is confident that he knows what Joseph and his scribes always do and always do not do, this should be interesting.

[_Darth J]

I remember when I was in grad school, when I thought I knew everything and was so much smarter than else, when no one else was capable of evaluating an argument, and when the latest thing I studied answered all the questions in the world, and when my experience was in taking tests and convincing professors, before I had to apply what I had studied to the real world.

Good times, good times.

[_EAllusion]

Darth J -

The Book of Abraham issue probably represents the best example of Smith being "caught red-handed" that one could hope for. So while it may not represent a significant reason for disbelief among non-Mormons at large, it generally will be listed as a top issue for those familiar with it because it's so apparent. So to answer your rhetorical questions, I think it depends on what group you are talking about. For the people apt to hang around places like this, it's a frequently brought up issue.

[_Trevor]

I remember when I was in grad school, when I thought I knew everything and was so much smarter than else, when no one else was capable of evaluating an argument, and when the latest thing I studied answered all the questions in the world, and when my experience was in taking tests and convincing professors, before I had to apply what I had studied to the real world.

Good times, good times.

Exactly. And, I am happy to give mak his due, but when he rushes in here shouting homoioteleuton as if none of us here had even heard of such a thing before and then posturing like this should end the entire argument, you know you have a grad student on your hands. Obviously a precocious one, but still.

But ya know, we are nothing but the brain damaged elderly with our aged synapses misfiring, so what do we know? That you should study out a problem thoroughly before you confidently pronounce definitive conclusions? Only wimps and morons do that. Hehehe.

I thought his thrust at Doctor Scratch was kind of cute. Clearly driven by preconceptions about the Good Doctor, but entertaining all the same.

[_Darth J]

Darth J -

The Book of Abraham issue probably represents the best example of Smith being "caught red-handed" that one could hope for. So while it may not represent a significant reason for disbelief among non-Mormons at large, it generally will be listed as a top issue for those familiar with it because it's so apparent. So to answer your rhetorical questions, I think it depends on what group you are talking about. For the people apt to hang around places like this, it's a frequently brought up issue.

I agree with that, but you don't need to know a damn thing about the Kirtland Egyptian Papers to arrive at that conclusion. The conclusion is based on comparing the starting product (papyri) to the end product (Book of Abraham), and the rest is just trivia at best.

maklelan is asserting that there is a "shift in emphasis" among "critics" about the Kirtland Egyptian Papers, and that this is "telling."

What shift in what emphasis by what critics?

All this debate about whether parts of this manuscript were dictated or copied is the most fervent, contentious rearranging of the Titanic's deck chairs that I have seen in a long time, on any issue in any field. Whatever Joseph Smith and his assistants were doing, it was a bunch of babbling nonsense and is, quite frankly, weird. I don't think that the "caught red handed" rests on a particular theory about the KEP. I think the "caught red handed" is that the whole Kirtland Egyptian Papers project exists in the first place. There is nothing about this whole exercise that looks prophetic or of God in the slightest. If you take Schryver's theory as 100% true, then Joseph Smith has never looked less like a prophet.

[_Aristotle Smith]

I remember when I was in grad school, when I thought I knew everything and was so much smarter than else, when no one else was capable of evaluating an argument, and when the latest thing I studied answered all the questions in the world, and when my experience was in taking tests and convincing professors, before I had to apply what I had studied to the real world.

Good times, good times.

Well said. At this point I would gladly pay good money to witness the day when reality comes up and kicks mak in the balls. I'm not saying it's going to happen with the KEP, but it will happen some day. It's happened to ALL of us. But, most of us don't make such a public spectacle of ourselves before it happens.

[_Darth J]

I remember when I was in grad school, when I thought I knew everything and was so much smarter than else, when no one else was capable of evaluating an argument, and when the latest thing I studied answered all the questions in the world, and when my experience was in taking tests and convincing professors, before I had to apply what I had studied to the real world.

Good times, good times.

Well said. At this point I would gladly pay good money to witness the day when reality comes up and kicks mak in the balls. I'm not saying it's going to happen with the KEP, but it will happen some day. It's happened to ALL of us. But, most of us don't make such a public spectacle of ourselves before it happens.

Yeah, there is sort of a "thank you sir, may I have another" aspect to karma.

[_harmony]

I agree with that, but you don't need to know a damn thing about the Kirtland Egyptian Papers to arrive at that conclusion. The conclusion is based on comparing the starting product (papyri) to the end product (Book of Abraham), and the rest is just trivia at best.

Okay... so in the end, when the cows come home and the birds fly up to roost in the trees and the sun goes down... what matters is that the papyri and the Book of Abraham don't match. At all. Not even a little bit.

Okay, you may return to your regularly scheduled arguments, and I will finish the deviled eggs.

[_Kevin Graham]

Whereas you may have technical training, I am surprised to hear these emphatic pronouncements and posturing, when in my academic experience scholars are usually much more careful than that.

I exposed his "training" as a red herring and he has no response. His training as a text-critic in Biblical studies hardly makes him an expert on 19th century dictation manuscirpts. Forensic Document Analysts are more qualified than he is. Biblical text-criticism is a completely different animal, and in spite of his training, he doesn't have the scholarly composure, or humilty, to recognize it. He is too busy window dressing his credentials and making demands, while refusing to reciprocate when people spend hours responding to his various "concerns." And Trev, unlike Mak, you are a professional academic, so I trust your judgment more than his, and in fact, I've learned much of what I know about academia by listening to the various university Professors who post on this forum. I mean it is nice he goes to Oxford and all, but he is still a student, and he'll probably be a student for years to come. So why pretend to be some kind of authority?

I remember when I was in grad school, when I thought I knew everything and was so much smarter than else

Hey Darth, this was one of the reasons I decided not to go to grad school. Could you imagine me being even more of a prick than I am already? ;)