The Interpreter; Bayes Theorem; Nephites and Mayans

[_Lemmie]

And from Bruce Dale, about 10 days after the paper came out:

Bruce E. Dale
on May 14, 2019 at 6:09 pm said:

....Do your homework. Be a responsible critic of our paper....

Well, he certainly got his wish, but I don't think it worked out the way he thought it would.

[_Arc]

I'd be surprised if many Germans were afraid to opt out because of what employers would think.

PG, The comment about opting out of church tax status raising questions with employers was from personal experience in the now distant past. It was intended to refer only to foreigners applying for work visas, and was advice given to me by the prospective employer before I applied. It turned out to be a great first professional job and my wife and I count our years in Germany among the most productive and rewarding of our lives.

[_Physics Guy]

Maybe things were different back then, or just different wherever you were in Germany.

I don't think many employers today would tell employees in general that they should declare a religion just to fit in, but what I could believe even now is that someone might advise Mormons specifically to register as generic evangelisch. Nobody much minds about people just not being religious, but people are leery of cults and there's some suspicion that Mormonism might be one. Even if people do find out you're Mormon anyway, they might be less worried if they thought that you yourself considered your church to be a flavor of protestantism, because that would suggest either that your Mormonism wasn't so weird after all, or that if it was at least you didn't take it so seriously as to insist it was different.

[Guest]

I don't think many employers today would tell employees in general that they should declare a religion just to fit in, but what I could believe even now is that someone might advise Mormons specifically to register as generic evangelisch.

Sounds about right. To indicate religious preference in the USMC we were offered a oval shaped aluminum medallion to wear on the same chain as our dog tags.

As the only Marine recruit with an embossed image of the Salt Lake temple on my medallion, I was instructed to attend generic Protestant (so Evangelische) services, each Sunday. There I was first introduced to the Doxology, which was a short sung affirmation and a part of every service. For any strict TBM's who may not be familiar, it is apparently of Lutheran origin and is short and sweet.

Praise God, from Whom all blessings flow; Praise Him, all creatures here below; Praise Him above, ye heav'nly host; Praise Father, Son, and Holy Ghost.

[_Physics Guy]

In the King James Version of the Bible the text reads: Because strait is the gate, and narrow is the way, which. leadeth unto life, and few there be that find it.
Matthew 7:14

"Strait" means narrow or tight, not straight. As in "Straits of Gibraltar", "strait jacket", "straitened circumstances". The "straight and narrow way" was John Bunyan's conflation in The Pilgrim's Progress. I don't know whether Bunyan just confused "strait" with "straight" even though he was writing in an era closer to King James, or whether he was using a deliberate pun to combine Jesus's narrow gate image with the several straight road symbols that are indeed in the Bible elsewhere. Plus Joseph Smith would surely have known Bunyan. Pilgrim's Progress was an insanely popular book in its day.

[_Lemmie]

I agree re: the Bunyan connection. Have you seen the 2012 article in the LA Review of Books written by William Davis that discusses the relationship between Bunyan's writings and the Book of Mormon? It's quite interesting, here's an excerpt:

Many of Bunyan’s other works play a significant role in the Book of Mormon, including Grace Abounding, Pilgrim’s Progress (Part 2), The Life and Death of Mr. Badman, Holy War, and several others.

In fact, based on my years of extensive research and discoveries, Holy War provides what may be the most comprehensive collection of parallel narratives bridging the Book of Mormon to Bunyan’s texts: battles between light- and dark-skinned combatants to the point of annihilation, siege warfare and battle strategies, seditious factions and civil strife, secret cabals attempting to seize government control, righteous men who are heroic captains of war, and even a personal visitation of Jesus Christ and his establishment of a righteous society.

The parallel narratives are ubiquitous and systemic, appearing with sustained consistency throughout the entire narrative of the Book of Mormon. Indeed, reading the Book of Mormon is tantamount to reading John Bunyan’s many works condensed into a single volume.

https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/hid ... f-mormon/#

This is the same author whose dissertation was on the oral performance aspect of the Book of Mormon, as discussed in
this thread.

[_Physics Guy]

Huh. I hadn't seen that and it's very interesting. Thanks.

I think I raised a question here myself once about Bunyan as an influence on Smith, probably in connection with the Early Modern English stuff, because the language of Bunyan was archaic in Smith's time but Bunyan's language would nonetheless have been known. I've never read much of the Book of Mormon and only ever actually read the two parts of Pilgrim's Progress, too long ago to remember much detail other than that the sequel was dull because Bunyan didn't allow the women and children to face any danger. So I'm pretty sure I wasn't thinking about Bunyan as a source for Smith's plots. Maybe I should read The Holy War.

No doubt Mormon apologists could sift through Davis's parallels and somehow find each one wanting, declaring it all to be parallelomania. I think the idea that Smith would literally copy Bunyan wholesale and in detail is a straw man, though. To me the plausible point is that stories like Smith's were in the air in his time, because people loved Bunyan. Those kinds of stories were not in the air in 300 BCE.

[_Physics Guy]

The Doxology was originally Anglican, but English-speaking Lutherans have indeed adopted it. Googling just now, I discovered it was written by a Bishop of Bath and Wells. A little alarming for a Blackadder fan.

[Guest]

I think the idea that Smith would literally copy Bunyan wholesale and in detail is a straw man, though. To me the plausible point is that stories like Smith's were in the air in his time, because people loved Bunyan. Those kinds of stories were not in the air in 300 BCE.

Physics Guy,

Your observations about "Pilgrim's Progress", and works of Bunyan in general as possible inspiration for Joseph Smith, are on point. In 2013, three years or so before you registered and 2 years before Lemmie officially arrived at MDB, Chris and Duane Johnson used some big data analysis methods to find books from Josephs Smith's time that could have served as source material for the Book of Mormon.

As was widely discussed on this board and vigorously panned by apologists for months on end, the Johnsons found a single book that did a lot more than inspire Joseph Smith. It served as a source from which he copied wholesale. Here is their Summary (more of a Brief) of their findings, which are presented in table after table of color coded word for word phrasing common to "The Late War" and the Book of Mormon. http://wordtree.org/thelatewar/

In October 2013, the authors conducted a data analysis comparing The Book of Mormon to over 100,000 books from the pre-1830's era. Out of the top matches, we discovered a book called The Late War Between the United States and Great Britain, a scriptural style account of the War of 1812 published in New York in 1816. Between 1817 and 1819 it was marketed "for the use of schools throughout the United States" under the title The Historical Reader.

Content at that website shows more than correspondences between "The Late War" and the Book of Mormon. One wonders if the Dales came across that work before they attempted to convince readers of Book of Mormon correspondences with Coe's "The Maya". The Johnsons left little doubt in rational people's minds that large portions of the Book of Mormon were more plagiarism than prophecy.

If you have not seen this, or not looked at it lately, it's probably worth a few clicks.
___________________

ETA: Corrected the starting dates of the saga from 2014 to 2013. The original thread went well into 2014 and included more than 1,500 posts.

[_DrW]

The Doxology was originally Anglican, but English-speaking Lutherans have indeed adopted it. Googling just now, I discovered it was written by a Bishop of Bath and Wells. A little alarming for a Blackadder fan.

Google also revealed a similar verse in German from 1561 with the same message, apparently sung to the same tune ("Old Hundredth" - meter is right) as the English language Lutheran Doxology.

"Lob, Ehr sei Gott im höchsten Thron,
desgleichen Christo, seinem Sohn,
und auch Democrat Tröster in der Not,
Democrat dreifaltigem Einen Gott."