Roger writes:
Subjective. We just disagree. The parallels are unique in their clustering and chronology and when you consider who wrote them.
Roger, this is one place where there exists a body of literature with accepted sets of criteria to judge this issue. If you want to move away from subjective labeling as much as possible, this is the direction it has to go. Otherwise we never get much beyond where we are in this discussion. It is a problem which has plagued LDS studies for quite some time, with a whole spat of "my parallels are better than yours" kind of issues.
If you want to wait, I talk about formal methodolgies in this regard in my forthcoming article in JOBMSARS (my that's a mouthful now), coming out in the next issue (which I have been told is being released this month, but the date keeps getting pushed back). And I am happy to discuss your issues at that moment.
As far as dating goes, chronology has no impact on the question - except, of course, that it does exclude some things. An early work obviously can't steal from a late work. But simply putting two works into the same time and space creates an additional burden not a smaller burdern - precisely because you have to find a way to exclude the kinds of parallels that are created by a common language, a common dialect, shared euphamisms and so on. These can just as easily be attributed to environment and not to creative borrowing from another text. For example, as with the phrase that was something like 'on the banks of the river', you have to look at other contemporary accounts and see how often other authors used the notion within that same environment, and if it occurs regularly, then it loses a lot of value as evidence of direct borrowing from one source to another.
Similarly, when looking at this kind of reliance, you have to make sure that there isn't a related body of literature. Where does Spalding get the idea of buried records for example? Vogel argues that buried stone boxes in Indian Mounds was a fairly common notion at that time period in that area, and so it shouldn't be taken as having come from any particular source (and he lists several similar types of accounts).
These kinds of problems have to be taken into consideration, and in a way that reduces the subjectivity as much as possible.
That's where testimony enters the debate.
Unless you can establish the veracity of the testimony, it isn't really that valuable - for the reasons I have already listed. You can always use it for your own reasons, but understand that in general, such an argument won't be accepted - and not simply because there is a desire to throw out as much as possible - rather, because the evidence itself is quite contested (and not just by believing LDS).
Acknowledged. But these are not typical parallels. There is a specific context that needs to be considered along with the parallels.
I think this depends on what you mean by specific context. If you are talking about textual elements then yes. If you are talking about historical scenarios, then no.
When the conversation gets beyond layman's terms, I leave it to the experts. A lot of smart people think Craig Criddle et al has used an appropriate mechanism which supports Dale's previous observations. I've seen nothing to suggest otherwise.
Criddle's study has very little to do with this subject. And I reject it's validity for a number of reasons. I would be happy to bring these issues up for discussion. I think the two biggest issues are - 1) that the study can only give us comparative probabilities - that is, for any textual sample, it can only tell us which of the test authors was most lkely to be the real author. In connection with this, it cannot tell us how likely it is that that person is the real author. If we reduce the test authors to a single author, that chance is (and this can be seen mathematically) 100% every time. Even if we know that that person cannot be the author. Can this be fixed? I think so.
2) The problem with the control samples is pretty big. The two control authors were fairly similar to the Book of Mormon - but also very similar to the artifical Isaiah/Malachi author. If we exclude the obvious chapters copied from the KJV of Isaiah, about a third of the text was incorrectly attributed to this Isaiah/Malachi author. Were we to run the test again without this author included, many of these misattributed chapters would appear to be reassigned to the two control authors and not to Spalding/Rigdon/et al. Meaning that the artifical Isaiah/Malachi identification ought to be seen as a control text and not immediately dismissed as the study does.
And of course, Joseph should have been included in the list of authors. Better yet, they should have scrapped the somewhat arbitrary vocabulary, picked another 200 authors, used a most common word list from that era (what they get is actually pretty close, so that's not much of a change) and tried to repeat the calculations using a lot of authors. In theory this shouldn't change the results, right? But when it does, we can only conclude that the narrow selection of authors pre-determined the outcome. However, such a wordprint study still can't tell us if plagiarism occurs, since it deals exclusively with vocabulary and not structure.
My own examination of 3, 4 and 5 word locutions indicates that on a basic phrasing level, there isn't any particular similarity between Spalding's work and the Book of Mormon that rises to a level above what we find between the Book of Mormon and other contemporary literature.
You're asking me to read Joseph Smith's mind. The answer could be that he was simply lazy--an attribute, by the way, that some of those who knew him claimed he possessed. Why should it be up to me to attempt to discover Joseph's motives?
Because otherwise you aren't making a very coherent argument. That's pretty simple. The act of plagiarism involves deliberate mimesis (not accidental, not coincidental, but deliberate). Being deliberate implies very strongly some kind of intention. Intention can be discussed in terms of the text. So you have to have something to say about it, or the argument starts to lose a lot of its impact. If Joseph has no reason to borrow from Spalding in these rather common details, then why does he do it? To say that it is unimportant when you are suggesting that he did so intentionally isn't going to go very far.
My forthcoming article which does deal with a case of literary borrowing in the Book of Mormon spends a fair amount of discussion on the question of intentions.
You could easily demonstrate that the coincidences I am suggesting are extraordinary, are not, by simply taking me up on the challenge I put to you in my previous post. I note that you ignored that challenge. If you can produce a genuine text written by one author prior to 1838 that has an equal or greater number of parallels to Smith's 1838 discovery narrative and was written by an author that people had been associating with the Book of Mormon since 1832, I will be convinced.
I ignored it because your challenge is too narrow. The reason is that coincidence isn't bound by content. If I can produce two texts which share a list of parallels between them (and they don't have to have anything in common with the Book of Mormon, the discovery story, or Spalding's work) that should work, right? I would be happy to provide that - because that would show that this kind of set of parallels occurs by coincidence. I don't need to duplicate them exactly.
I see. Attacking my "experience" might work where other arguments have not?
How much literary theory have you actually read? Have you read any arguments that deal with this kind of issue? I am legitimately interested.
Ben M.