Jersey Girl wrote:Then you tell me, what the possible significance of this is when the entire Book of Mormon was fabricated out of whole cloth and writings borrowed from others including the Bible?
Is this the strongest case for Book of Mormon evidences? One name?
On the Alma thing. I probably read about this before, but simply forgot about it. Once you realize that the Book of Mormon simply is a 19th century document, there is little reason to keep tabs on every little dribble of evidence the apologists stack in the house of cards (fewer and thinner cards every year, it seems).
Now, on to your question. If it hasn't happened already, someone is bound to bring up the NHM thing, which Don Bradley effectively refuted long ago. The simple fact is that the evidence for the antiquity of the Book of Mormon is exceedingly poor. Most people, unmotivated by testimony, would hardly mistake it for anything other than a 19th century document that relies heavily on the Bible as source material.
I think the best that a Book of Mormon scholar can do is discuss how there are things in the Book of Mormon that suggest its antiquity, as in, "we wouldn't expect a 19th century forgery to exhibit these characteristics." The problem with this thinking is that it assumes a particular vision of what a forgery *must* look like, as a kind of strawman, and then proceeds to attack this version of the forgery. I would say that we might expect a 19th century forgery to contain lots of Bible quotations, a very simple and clear indicator of fraud, but then there is always some mental/rhetorical gymnastic to try to explain this obvious fact away.
As I said, I would bet that many of the things that Kerry brought up are also true of the Bible, and it is perfectly possible that this is where many of the "ancient characteristics" of the Book of Mormon are coming from--the Bible.
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