More on the Financing of Mopologetics

[_Daniel Peterson]

by the way: I'm still waiting for you to address the reasons why the FP revised their statement on the Hill Cumorah. Since, you know, this demonstrates a pretty significant tie between apologetics and the Brethren.....

There was no First Presidency statement on the Hill Cumorah. There was no First Presidency statement on the Hill Cumorah for the First Presidency to revise. Hence, the First Presidency did not revise a First Presidency statement on the Hill Cumorah. Thus, no reasons exist or are to be sought for the First Presidency's revision of a First Presidency statement on the Hill Cumorah. Thus, too, no revision by the First Presidency of a First Presidency statement on the Hill Cumorah occurred to demonstrate a link between apologetics and the Brethren. This being so, no significant link has been shown by the revision of a First Presidency statement by the First Presidency to exist between apologetics and the Brethren.

Michael Watson, a secretary at Church headquarters until recently, wrote a private letter responding to a private question about the location of the final Nephite battle. That letter was ill-advised, staking out a position that is, in fact, not clearly the Church's official position (though it reflects common opinion). It was made public. The fact that it was ill-advised was pointed out to Brother Watson. He wrote a letter effectively backtracking from the ill-advised original letter.

This is a silly issue, largely of Scratch's manufacture. There is nothing to it. I won't discuss it forever and ever and ever and ever and ever while being treated as a liar and a sneak, no matter how much Scratch tries to bait me.

P.S. Here's yet another vital Mopologetic tract:

http://www.amazon.com/Elixir-Gnostics-p ... im_b_img_4

Look at the actual books, folks, if you're really interested in the truth rather than merely in apostagetics. Judge for yourselves.

[_Daniel Peterson]

So, let me ask you again: Are there high hopes amongst the Brethren that you guys will discover a "NAHOM", or something of that nature, in one of these texts? Y/N?

Not that I've ever heard. And if anybody expects anything of that sort, such expectations are extraordinarily unlikely to be fulfilled. I certainly anticipate no such discoveries in On Asthma, by Moses Maimonides, or in the Stoic texts recovered from the Herculaneum Papyri:

http://www.amazon.com/Asthma-Brigham-Yo ... 656&sr=1-2

http://ispart.BYU.edu/?page=96&sidebar


P.S. For a hot Mopologetic time, dial up the BYU-CUA Syriac Studies Reference Library:

http://ispart.BYU.edu/?page=54&sidebar

[_Gadianton]

And if anybody expects anything of that sort, such expectations are extraordinarily unlikely to be fulfilled

Tell that to Hugh Nibley, who built his career on these kinds of hopes and who was the inspiration for FARMS to begin with.

[_harmony]

And if anybody expects anything of that sort, such expectations are extraordinarily unlikely to be fulfilled

Tell that to Hugh Nibley, who built his career on these kinds of hopes and who was the inspiration for FARMS to begin with.

I don't see how Nibley, a guy who is conveniently dead, his career, his aspirations, or his inspiration, is at all related to what the Maxwell Institute does now.

Geez, you guys are beating a dead horse! Bury it, for pity's sake!

[_Daniel Peterson]

And if anybody expects anything of that sort, such expectations are extraordinarily unlikely to be fulfilled

Tell that to Hugh Nibley, who built his career on these kinds of hopes and who was the inspiration for FARMS to begin with.

Hugh Nibley expected to find evidence for Mormonism in Maimonides' treatise On Asthma and in Stoic papyri from Herculaneum?

I know of not even the tiniest smidgin of apologetic intent in publishing the Medical Works of Moses Maimonides or Suhrawardi's Hikmat al-Ishraq. But I'm just the guy who edits and publishes them, so -- in Scratchworld -- what would I know? And I'm probably lying, anyway. Right, antishock8?

Good grief. We publish the Dead Sea Scrolls in searchable electronic form so that absolutely anybody with any interest in them, whether it be grammatical or New-Testament theological or Mormon apologetic or history-of-Judaism or biblical-text-critical, can do with them absolutely anything that he or she wants to do with them. That's why my friend Emanuel Tov, head of the Dead Sea Scrolls publication team and a very distinguished professor at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, agreed to be the overall editor for our database.

Incidentally, here's still another crucial Mopologetic text:

http://www.amazon.com/Theodore-Qurrah-L ... 162&sr=1-1

And don't miss this one, which, Brother Orson Fielding Smith Jr. declares, is absolutely certain to contain cryptic references to Joseph Smith, somewhere:

http://www.amazon.com/Metaphysics-Heali ... 297&sr=1-1

[_antishock8]

The Neal A. Maxwell Institute for Religious Scholarship exists to:

Describe and defend the Restoration through highest quality scholarship

Provide critically edited, primary resources (ancient religious texts) to scholars and lay persons around the world (There's the Dead Sea Scrolls)

Build bridges of understanding and goodwill to Muslim scholars by providing superior editions of primary texts

Provide an anchor of faith in a sea of LDS Studies
--------------------------------------------------------------

Wow. If it were left up to Mr. Peterson, I suppose one could come away thinking the Maxwell Institute purpose is to do the Department of Middle Eastern Studies job. Why in the world would there be an institute dedicated to "Defending the Restoration" AND "Providing Superior Editions of Primary Islamic Texts"? That seems... Well, it seems awfully cobbled together. What strange little synergy we have. It's almost, dare I say it, as if the apologists want the veneer of academia for their institution so they take one of their main contributor's field of expertise and make it part of its Mission Statement. Work that should be done anyway for a Department of Middle Eastern studies is now listed under an apologist institute in order to distance it from its own purpose for existing in the first place.

Oh, what a tangled little web we weave when we attempt to deceive.

[_Trevor]

Thus, though DCP may be a Professor of Arab Studies, it seems that, within the context of ISPART and its various branches, his Arab work is expected to support "the restored Gospel."

Read through Medical Aphorisms 1 or The Philosophy of Illumination or The Decisive Treatise or Averrroës's Middle Commentary on Aristotle's De Anima and then elucidate how these works serve an apologetic function. Good grief. All of the METI books are available from the University of Chicago Press. This ignorant and jaundiced speculation just makes you look foolish.

I am fixing the quote on this, because I did not write the material Daniel is quoting.

[_Trevor]

Rather, the raison d'etre of The Maxwell Institute, as per Pres. Samuelson, is to figure out how they might be.

Come on, Scratch. You have to construe the phrase "support the Restored Gospel" pretty narrowly for it to refer to apologetics alone.

[Guest]

Wow. If it were left up to Mr. Peterson, I suppose one could come away thinking the Maxwell Institute purpose is to do the Department of Middle Eastern Studies job. Why in the world would there be an institute dedicated to "Defending the Restoration" AND "Providing Superior Editions of Primary Islamic Texts"? That seems... Well, it seems awfully cobbled together. What strange little synergy we have. It's almost, dare I say it, as if the apologists want the veneer of academia for their institution so they take one of their main contributor's field of expertise and make it part of its Mission Statement. Work that should be done anyway for a Department of Middle Eastern studies is now listed under an apologist institute in order to distance it from its own purpose for existing in the first place.

Oh, what a tangled little web we weave when we attempt to deceive.

antishock8,

Although I agree that Dr. Peterson seems to be exaggerating in the other direction, you are reaching here. I know some little thing about these other projects that the Maxwell Institute is engaging in. They are serious scholarly projects that have little or no apparent apologetic intent behind them. I have shown a video connected to the Herculanaeum project to my Roman history class every year. It is about the imaging of burn papyri to recover lost text--not the defense of Mormonism. METI is likewise a serious project.

The problem here, it seems to me, is that FARMS's reputation was built primarily on apologetics. It was always, however, more broadly conceived as a scholarly project. The Neal Maxwell Institute is strangely cobbled together, but that is not because it is designed to be misleading. It's because it simply is a strange cobbling designed, as my quotes were intended to show, by BYU's administration and Board of Trustees. Apologetics is a part of the Institutes business, but it is far from its only business, or even the most important aspect of it.

My suspicion in this case is that a storefront of religion (albeit substantive and active) was tacked on these other scholarly projects to increase their likelihood of survival under the gaze of some administrators and church leaders who understand and value "describe and defend the Restored Gospel" much more than METI.

[_antishock8]

http://maxwellinstitute.BYU.edu/authors.php

Just in case anyone wants to be disabused of the notion that the MI authors aren't conducting apologetics en masse.