Kishkumen wrote:He never read the whole thing either. He tried, but he fell asleep in the "cribbing Isaiah" chapters. Just like I did when I was 8 years old.
It's interesting that almost all the cribbing comes in the books of Nephi, which replace the lost book of Lehi. It's almost as if he were trying to pad that part of the book because of his inability to reproduce the earlier draft.
I hadn't thought of that - great observation.
Parley P. Pratt wrote:We must lie to support brother Joseph, it is our duty to do so.
Buffalo wrote:I hadn't thought of that - great observation.
Apparently, 1 Nephi to Words of Mormon was written/translated last. I suspect he was running out of material by that point. The Book of Ether, for example, is sort of a Reader's Digest version of the Nephite/Lamanite saga, with the addition of glowing stones.
1 Nephi is mostly exposition, but in 2 Nephi he seems to have run out of steam and just pasted in Isaiah passages (most of them anachronistic).
consiglieri wrote:A geocentric model (if it is such) would seem to suggest a more ancient view of the cosmos, and could have implications for an original date of production. (I'm trying to be careful not to overstate the case.)
But wasn't Abe's astronomy billed as something that was god-given? So even if the egocentricity of the matter suggests antiquity, antiquity back to what? Something that god got wrong? Any way you look at it, the Book of Abraham is nothing but a blight on JSJr's claims of divine prophecy.