MG: How do you think the Book of Mormon came to be?
Themis:The evidence suggests an 19th century production.
The 1830 edition of the Book of Mormon is essentially what Joseph Smith dictated. Eyewitness accounts bear this out. How was this done? Remember, he had a seer stone inside of a hat for a good portion of the process. The scribes had to keep up with what they heard without paragraphing, punctuation, or knowledge of how a sentence might end. Joseph Smith dictated in blocks of twenty words or so and he himself may not have known where a complicated sentence was going. How do you explain the actual evidence/process in regards to the translation?
I'm assuming you've also read Emma's account in regards to her participation in the the translation process. She mentions that Joseph never worked from notes or script and that whenever he took a break, he would begin again exactly where he left off, without seeing the manuscript or having anyone read back to him the last few sentences he had translated.
Terryl Givens said:
The naked implausibility of gold plates, seer stones, and warrior-angels finds little by way of scientific corroboration, but attributing to a young farmboy the 90-day dictated and unrevised production of a 500-page narrative that incorporates sophisticated literary structures, remarkable Old World parallels, and some 300 references to chronology and 700 to geography with virtually perfect self-consistency is problematic as well.
I think there is more to it than brashly stating that the Book of Mormon is simply an 19th century production.
The narrative complexity in and of itself does not jive with the mode and means of translation.
Look at the book of Ether.
From Grant Hardy:
The genealogy in the first chapter provides the framework for the chronicle of Jaredite kings in the chapters 6 through 11. That is, Joseph dictated a log string of twenty-seven unusual names and then several pages later repeated the list, but this time with stories attached to each name. If he were composing as he went along, this would be quite a feat of memory, especially since the names in the narrative portion are in reverse order from the way they appear in the genealogical list.
Throwing out sound bites such as "The evidence suggests an 19th century production" doesn't do a whole lot to actually show evidence of anything except that you have an opinion.
Is there a Media Matters equivalent for Mormon critics to draw from for their programmed and politically correct (at least for this board) sound bites?
Regards,
MG