I have a tendency to write to much, so I will try and keep this short. [edit: I failed I think]
However, I don't personally see these as anachronisms or even consider that a valid category when we are talking about the Book of Mormon as a nineteenth century text.
The question of Early Modern English, in the context of a 19th century text is an anachronism. As such, the discussion about anachronisms in the 19th century text is already occurring (and I had quite a bit to say about it in the presentation that I linked). Texts can be deliberately anachronistic. Sometimes anachronisms can be helpful for estimating a terminus for a date range for authorship of a text. But in general anachronisms speak only to the question of verisimilitude and not to the question of historicity. We routinely (and incorrectly) view one as the other (I have written a lot about this in various places). The classic example of this in biblical literature is the issue of the Book of Esther. It has a high degree of verisimilitude. In fact, to use Symmachus' words, "To say that something has an origin at some point in the past is to say that the number of historical anachronisms contained in that something is close to 0." The Book of Esther fits that description. It is also a fictional novel.
On the other hand, it is impossible to use this sort of statement about the Book of Mormon. At its most basic level, the Book of Mormon is written in English. This means that the text itself cannot possibly have an origin any earlier than the introduction of the most recent English language in the text (to keep with the paradigm of Early Modern English). So any statement we make about anachronisms in the Book of Mormon relative to the alleged ancient source (the gold plates) have to be assessed so that we can distinguish between potential anachronisms that can be attributed to the translation of the Book of Mormon and potential anachronisms that cannot be attributed to the translation. I want to emphasize that part of my position is that this goes both ways. Believers have to be aware of the fact that the text is a translation and so they also have to distinguish between artifacts and textual features that should be attributed to the modern translation and artifacts and textual features that should be attributed to a potential ancient source. The assumptions about translation must be articulated (and the whole loose versus tight sort of thing doesn't actually mean a whole lot - because it is a description of what the translation looked like rather than a description of translation itself).
In effect, when I read your comment, I read something like this. I think that the believer makes assumptions A, B, and C when approaching this topic. Using those same assumptions, I find problems D, E, and F to be unresolved. Don't get me wrong. Your argument isn't necessarily wrong, but, you do have to be careful of raising a straw man. These kinds of arguments never work very well. Why? Because we don't really get facts as much as we get interpretation. If we argue that methodology produces different data sets depending on how we interpret it, we still are agreeing that the methodology is acceptable. When the methodology is bad, we should argue that the methodology is wrong. The Interpreter article that Bokovoy is critical of is all interpretive. It doesn't actually engage the "Modern Scholarship" that could help us identify the contents of the Brass Plates. As often as not, it uses interpretation from the Book of Mormon to try and correct that modern scholarship. Consider, for example:
Bokovoy’s view that the Book of Mormon concept of a personal devil and a redemptive Christ are also anachronistic before the 2nd century BC is also answered if a version of the Book of Moses which now forms part of the Pearl of Great Price were part of the Brass Plates.
What happens here? We take modern scholarship and modify it on the basis of what we believe rather than what modern scholarship tells us. I note in passing that the Book of Moses is also a modern text, subject to all of the same concerns as the modern Book of Mormon text. This is part of what makes this paper problematic (even it its now-edited form).
If we really wanted to use modern scholarship to uncover the contents of the Brass Plates, the argument would need to go something like this:
1: Identify the tools that modern scholarship uses to document textual histories (as it does with the Documentary Hypothesis) and not just some broad principles.
2: Treating the Book of Mormon as a translation, identify candidates texts that can be argued to have originated with the Brass Plates (excluding intertexts explainable as translation artifacts, inner-intertextuality, and so on). This means in particular allowing the Book of Mormon to be a part of the textual history of the Brass Plates at the end, and not at the beginning.
3: Compare our resulting urtext to modern scholarship's chronology of the biblical text to see if our reconstruction fits into that chronological history.
From there we could start to draw some reasoned conclusions about the make-up of the Brass Plates (assuming of course that they were a real thing). This would be using modern scholarship to help us determine the contents of the Brass Plates.
Back to Symmachus:
I see things like the "loose translation theory," a form of which you seem to present here, as an attempt to deal with that. Thank you for the link, by the way, to your article. I think it is good that the believers have push-back from within. My impression of the historicists is that they are really trying to do apologetics for a view of the Book of Mormon they learned in Primary, so I think it is good that there is someone trying to advance a more "grown up" view. That danger I see with it (as everyone else has) is that it can run into inconsistency: something is historical until an anachronism comes up, then there is Roland Barthes and the slipperiness of language and what is a translation anyway? If you take this approach, how do you balance this tension?
First, I haven't said anything that would favor either a loose or a tight translation. Those terms don't really work well. Why? Because they are descriptions of what the process looks like and not descriptions of what is going on. That's part of the point of the presentation that I linked. Here are two statements I made near then end:
I want to point out something which I think should be obvious here – this deliberate use of archaic language can be understood in many different ways. It can be understood both in the context of a tight and loose model of dictation. And it can be understood with a wide range of potential translators. What this framework does is help us articulate what role in our communicative act is responsible for the features we see in the text.
Being tight or loose aren't descriptive of what is going on, they are interpretative in nature. I haven't seen much from either camp that would force me to recognize one over the other from the evidence that is the text. And the other statement:
Some of you might be aware of the response to David Bokovoy’s suggestion that the Book of Mormon could be considered at least in part pseudepigraphical. This isn’t an unreasonable conclusion if we adopt the tool kit of biblical studies as our primary approach, and we conflate the modern text of the Book of Mormon with its ancient sources. In a sense, it is perhaps similar to the conclusions we might see from Biblical Studies if they only used the text of the King James Bible, and had no access to archaeological information or original language sources.
I think I would recharacterize a little of this now (given time to better articulate my point of view). What I meant here in this is that if we take the Book of Mormon as it is (we don't try to differentiate between the Book of Mormon and an ancient source), then the text clearly has modern elements that need to be attributed to the production of the text around 1830. When we attribute all of the text-as-it-is to some ancient author we make the text pseudepigraphical (as Bokovoy suggested).
If we want to use the tools of modern scholarship to uncover its potential sources and the way that it uses them, we can then discuss how that process can reveal the contents of the Brass Plates. How do we balance tension? In the same way it has been done elsewhere. Mormonism is tied a little too tightly to its idea of a perfect text and a perfect translation. To use an analogy, in early Mormonism there was a significant resistance to the King James text as an accurate text. But it was the only one available in any sort of mass distribution. When the first major English revision comes out (the Revised Version in 1885), Mormons start sounding more and more like King James only types. Today, to suggest (as I believe) that the KJV is a relatively poor translation, all things considered, would be heresy for many. I think that we start to find our balance as I suggested in that presentation. So to quote the last part of my presentation (even if it is a bit lengthy):
When we approach the text of the Book of Mormon, our studies need to be cognizant of the Book of Mormon as a modern text – and as a text that has been recontextualized for a modern audience – a text whose author was potentially aware of the interpretations that would be given to the text, and the implication of those interpretations on issues contemporary with its first readers. Should we be surprised to sometimes find our own questions reflected back at us from its pages?
When we look for chiasmus, we also have to ask how that chiasmus will filter through the potential translation layers we envision. When we see places where the text engages New Testament ideas and values, is this potentially the way that a translator understood the text in the modern context? Is this the way the translator believed that the original author would have expressed himself, if he had written it in English, and in a modern time frame? And when we see text that is nearly identical to the King James, perhaps it is there as a way of helping its first readers identify the biblical passages being referred to, instead of suggesting that they are completely literal translations from the gold plates that just happen to validate the King James translation.
Brigham Young in a sermon delivered in 1862 seemed to recognize a fluidity in context:
When God speaks to the people, he does it in a manner to suit their circumstances and capacities. … Should the Lord Almighty send an angel to rewrite the Bible, it would in many places be very different from what it now is. And I will even venture to say that if the Book of Mormon were now to be rewritten, in many instances it would materially differ from the present translation.
I believe this is even truer today that it was at the end of the 19th century. And I believe that a more nuanced understanding of translation as a process can help us understand how to place Joseph Smith and the Book of Mormon as a translation of an ancient text.
Perhaps a little more bluntly - Mormonism has to drop its notion of a perfect text - which is, inevitably a fictional notion (and not a uniquely LDS one either - it is very much in line with Evangelical views of the Bible). From there, things improve. That there are additional unrelated hurdles to this, I agree (but that is a different discussion).
Perhaps, to wrap this up, it is worth noting that Mormonism is a young religious tradition. It is hard to compare it with rabbinic Judaism. Give it a few hundred years, and we will see what it becomes. Until then, those of us who would be considered progressive Mormons, are not frustrated so much by the lack of change as by the speed at which that change comes.
I can't help but wondering who the bigger idiot is, the author or the proprietor of the Interpreter for attempting to impress the whole entire world with his almost record breaking every friday article posting at Interpreter even though the papers aren't even as valuable as toilet paper. Toilet paper at least has a useful function.
