David Bokovoy Issues a Devastating Critique of the Mopologists' "Scholarship"

[Benjamin McGuire]

I think this cuts right to the heart of the matter as to why I think that the topic of the translation and even the composition of the Book of Mormon belongs more to the realm of contemporary philosophy of language than to the canons of lower and higher criticisms. To that end I’m thinking along the lines of Gottleib Frege’s distinction between the sense (Sinn) and reference (Bedeutung) of a word.

When we see a supposed Nephite writer using the term “horse” this always generates a lot of discussion (primarily among different stripes of Mormons) about how the word is being used (the sense/sinn) and if the usage is correct. I find it much more interesting to discuss the ontological commitments the Nephite writer has when employing “horse”, what is the reference? There is an undeniable existential component at play, what is the actual thing the Nephite writer had in mind when “horse” was employed?

Pointing out that Joseph didn’t really even have unmediated access to the Nephite writer makes the issue even worse, can we even legitimately call a process of interpreting signs from God through prophetic instruments an actual translation? Going from a text written in one ancient natural language to a new text that is written in a modern natural language is not a good description of what Joseph Smith did by even the most hagiographic of accounts.

This really was part of the subject of the presentation I linked much earlier in which I analyzed the ways in which the Mormon community has dealt with the issue of translation using speech-act theory. Joseph Smith always liked to say that he translated by the gift and power of God. But this is a direct quote from the Book of Mormon itself - from the last part of the text that was translated before he finished. And this means that his description is more rhetorical than literal - and shouldn't be used as the springboard for understanding the process.

As a side note on the issue of the philosophy of language in connection to the Book of Mormon, I sometimes wonder if the Book of Mormon's concern over language and meaning isn't itself a significant sort of anachronism. I would almost have to believe that Nephi's education included some of the classics (which for 600 BC says a lot right?) Had he read Phaedrus? Cratylus? He starts off so certain in his own ability to express himself, and ends up suggesting that the text is broken and the only way we can recover it is by reading with the spirit (which is something beyond the text). It was this recognition that pushed me to write my essay (and the fact that I can have such a title says a great deal I think): Nephi: A Postmodernist Reading

https://independent.academia.edu/BenjaminMcGuire1

[Gabriel]

But again, this is why I emphasize so much the fact that we should try to have some common working ground in terms of what we think is meant by translation ....

I'm all ears, Brother. What do YOU mean by the word "translation".

[Gadianton]

Okay Ben this is really interesting. It's kind of mind boggling also, and I'm having trouble pinpointing why that is so.

I think the camel example was a good benchmark. But let me see if I understood your point precisely. This is an anachronism in the original text. The text in Hebrew talks about camels during a time when there were no camels. So it's really an interpolation by the guy who came up with the story, right? The King James translators didn't put it there. But can't an inerrantist say that a Hebrew scribe put "camel" because they'd lost the knowledge of the word that described the real animal that was in the original text, that did exist during that time?

As for Riplakish. I think you mean that the Jaredites predated Deuteronomy by a very long time, and so it's out of place. I don't get how this is a clear example of an anachronism in the original text -- presumably the gold plates. You mentioned something about "ancient source are those that come through the narrative units" -- did the story of Riplakish "come through the narrative units"? If so, can you expound on what "coming through the narrative unit" means? I'm really not getting it.

To me it seems like the typical problem that 'translation' can solve. The gold plates said 'bad, greedy king', and Joseph Smith fleshes that out with concepts he was familiar with from the Bible.

[Benjamin McGuire]

No, that's not correct at all. Anachronisms are used all the time in determining historicity and other kinds of historical value. They are not just used to determine termini ante and post quem. Some people might incorrectly view verisimilitude as synonymous with historicity, but it is equally incorrect to disentangle them when we are talking about historicity. Something that has verisimilitude might entail historicity or not, but if something has historicity, it will have verisimilitude, as well. If we are asking about historicity, verisimilitude is a not a separate category from historicity but a sub-species of it; historicity is the superstructure, and verisimilitude is an important component of the structure, though by no means the only one. That is one reason why I framed my view of historicity as scalar, because a text claiming to be set in a historic moment should have a high degree of verisimilitude—seeming to be a from the point in time claimed—with that moment. But it can obviously vary depending on the case, and one needs other blocks to build that superstructure.

Perhaps we will have to agree to disagree. This is a fundamental problem with texts that make them different from other objects. As an artifact, we can always discuss its context. Words can be dated. Grammar can be dated. Bindings, and ink and paper all can be examined. But once we shift to what a text means, it has to be interpreted. And interpretation is not something that is objective and external. This is the point of the issue of historical fiction. In dealing with the Book of Esther in the Old Testament, Adele Berlin makes the following points (and she does a much better job than I do in explaining this) - JBL, 121/1 "The Book of Esther and Ancient Storytelling":

On what grounds is a story to be judged fictional? Because it is easier to accept a patently unrealistic story, fictionality was sometimes determined by whether or not the events of the story could have happened or by whether the story seemed realistic. But to judge a story’s historicity by its degree of realism is to mistake verisimilitude for historicity. Verisimilitude is the literary term for the illusion of reality. Just because a story sounds real does not mean that it is. Realistic fiction is just as fictional as nonrealistic fiction. Among the leading arguments for Esther’s historicity are that its setting is authentic and that its knowledge of Persian custom is detailed and accurate. But this realistic background proves nothing about the historicity of the story, as our aforementioned commentators were well aware.

And ...

What about the current reassessments of the Bible’s historicity, especially by the scholars known as minimalists? Clearly, the minimalists do not believe that the large block of narrative from Genesis through Kings is credible history. Do they, though, think that these writings were intended to be read as historiography in ancient times? Ancient historiography is quite different from modern historiography in that ancient historiography may include fictions, myths, legends, and hearsay. So Genesis–Kings can still be called historiography even if it is patently untrue (from a modern perspective). Just to make matters more confusing, I will mention that at least one classical scholar questions whether Herodotus’s work was historiography. Where this leaves us is that the ancient Jew read the Bible much as the ancient Greek read Herodotus. But what they believed about it, and in what sense they believed it, remains unclear. We moderns should not believe either one, but I suspect that Herodotus still has more credibility than the Bible, although not as much as he used to. Actually, it may be more correct to conclude that the ancients did not care about historical accuracy, although they surely cared about the past. If so, this entire discussion would strike them as trying to make a distinction without a difference. But that will not deter us from pursuing it.

And finally:

What does it mean to call Herodotus a storyteller? It does not necessarily deny that he was a historian. It means that when a storyteller tells a story—be that story historically true or not and be that story intended as historiography or not—he (or she) uses narrative forms and conventions. That is what Momigliano had in mind when he said that many features of the book of Esther can be explained in terms of international storytelling. The use of the same narrative form and often the same type of material for true stories and for imaginative ones is what makes it so hard to distinguish between historiography and fiction. Esther resembles Herodotus, especially in its use of motifs, not because Esther is like Herodotus in being historiography but because it is like Herodotus in being narrative. Both are stories about Persians from roughly the same time and place.

So we get to this point you make - it can be verisimilar without having historicity but not have historicity without being verisimilar? How could you even tell the difference between something that is merely verisimilar and something that has both the qualities of being verisimilar and having historicity? Does the fact that Herodotus tries to provide history through narrative (through the use of form and conventions) suddenly mean that it has no historicity? On some level, I think that we have this problem in discussion from time to time over what it means to have the quality of historicity.

The claim that it is a fictional novel is an interpretation open to dispute and not something established by evidence external to the text, but let me ask you: what kinds of evidentiary categories do you think have been applied to support that interpretation? Applying those same categories to the Book of Mormon, do you think it would be more likely to come out as a fictional novel or as the translation of an ancient document from Meso-American Hebrews?

And here we go. The claim that Esther is fictional isn't really open to dispute. Yes, you can find a lot of people who dispute it. But, there is a relative wealth of external data for the period that is described in the novel. And none of it matches in the personal and immediate details. Again though, this merely illustrates the problem.

The challenge with the Book of Mormon (and I will agree that it does not fare well under historical analysis for a variety of reasons), is that we do not have a way of placing the context of the text in a real world setting. And this is why so much discussion is limited to the first two books (which do have connections to a historically known context). And also where there is so much ongoing debate over the geography, in an attempt to establish a historical context. So we do not have a relative wealth of external details. And this means that the Book of Mormon is anything but a poster-child for this sort of question, while the Book of Esther is.

See, that is where I think you are again being quite slippery, in this case with your over-literal distinction between text and translation (just as in the inaccurate opposition you make between verisimilitude and historicity). By definition, a translation is a text that has an origin in another text. A given Text B that is a translation of necessity has an origin in Text A that precedes it in time. Otherwise, we are not talking about a translation at all and have no need of either the category or the word. So, in your view, is the Book of Mormon the text a translation of another text or not?

I think you probably didn't really read my presentation on the translation of the Book of Mormon, did you ....

The "tight translation theory" as I understand it, is that the translation produced (regardless of the process by which it was produced) reflects a close correspondence between source language and target language.

No. This isn't the case at all. Let me quote Royal Skousen, who I think coined the notion:

The manuscripts and text show that Joseph Smith apparently received the translation word for word and letter for letter, in what is known as “tight control.”

Tight translation means that Joseph Smith read the text using the interpreters/seer stone. He saw words, and read them. He didn't even need to have the text in front of him (hence the later descriptions of the stone in the hat). Whether this corresponds to a word-for-word translation or even a letter-to-letter translation is purely speculative.

Unless you think it is God who is deliberate introducing the archaisms, which I would consider a respectable view but not an arguable one.

I certainly thought that I gave that option a reasonable justification in that presentation. It isn't my model either. But, I think you can make a reasoned argument to that effect (even if you do not).

Please, please, please. Go and read that presentation.

[Benjamin McGuire]

But again, this is why I emphasize so much the fact that we should try to have some common working ground in terms of what we think is meant by translation ....

I'm all ears, Brother. What do YOU mean by the word "translation".

I will quote myself from my presentation:

Generally speaking, translation is usually not one communicative act, but two. Göran Sonesson tells us:

There is something fairly obvious about translation being a double act of communication. Being at the receiving end, I want to read the new novel by Mo Yan, but I am unable to read Chinese. Therefore, somebody must have read the novel before me, and this must have been a person who can understand Chinese. It must also be a person who can write my language.

This person, then, is at the receiving end of one process of communication, but at the start of another process. What makes this model more useful for understanding translation than earlier models, however, is the ideas about communication as such which I have presented above that the receiver is an active subject, who must concretise the artefact produced by the receiver into a percept; … The translator is a doubly active subject, as interpreter and as creator of a new text. He or she is the receiver of one act of communication and the sender of another one. He or she first has to transform the artefact into an object of his/her own experience. This is a process that cannot be described as encoding, with any intentional depth of the word, because this term suggests a simple exchange of one coded item for another. The correspondence often has to be at a much higher level of understanding.

To put it in less technical terms, the first act of communication is a reading (and interpretation) by the translator, and the second act is a transfer (which is also an interpretation) of what they read into the new language and context in the translation. In other words, in the first communication act, the translator functions as part of the audience. In the second act, the translator participates normally as both the animator and the author functions of the speaker role.

Göran Sonesson, (2014) “Translation as a double act of communication. A perspective from the semiotics of culture.” In Our World: a Kaleidoscopic Semiotic Network. Acts of the 11th World Congress of Semiotics of IASS in Nanjing, October 5 – 9, 2012, Vol. 3. Wang, Yongxiang, & JI, Haihong (eds.), 83-101. Nanjing: Hohai University Press.

That is probably my favorite description of the translation process (and has been for some time).

[Gabriel]

I'm all ears, Brother. What do YOU mean by the word "translation".

To put it in less technical terms, the first act of communication is a reading (and interpretation) by the translator, and the second act is a transfer (which is also an interpretation) of what they read into the new language and context in the translation. In other words, in the first communication act, the translator functions as part of the audience. In the second act, the translator participates normally as both the animator and the author functions of the speaker role.

That is probably my favorite description of the translation process (and has been for some time).

That's reasonable.

However, Joseph Smith didn't know Reformed Egyptian or Egyptian. It would only have been so much gibberish without divine aid. So as translator, there wouldn't be an interpretive step. He could only write what "he was told". In that sense, he would also have had to leave concerns as to for whom he was writing in the care of Providence.

[Benjamin McGuire]

Okay Ben this is really interesting. It's kind of mind boggling also, and I'm having trouble pinpointing why that is so.

I think the camel example was a good benchmark. But let me see if I understood your point precisely. This is an anachronism in the original text. The text in Hebrew talks about camels during a time when there were no camels. So it's really an interpolation by the guy who came up with the story, right? The King James translators didn't put it there. But can't an inerrantist say that a Hebrew scribe put "camel" because they'd lost the knowledge of the word that described the real animal that was in the original text, that did exist during that time?

I am sure inerrantists can say whatever they want. I am not one. I think that there is no valid reason (on any level) to adopt such a view. And consequently, I don't usually bother trying to correct it. I don't believe that the Bible or the Book of Mormon (or really any text for that matter) is a privileged text in this way. Going back to my presentation on the translation of the Book of Mormon, I did make this related comment:

In 2003, Glen Scorgie contributed to a volume on Biblical translation from an Evangelical perspective. He began by discussing some of the challenges caused by popular Evangelical (mis)conceptions of translation. He wrote:

According to the historic evangelical view, divine inspiration is more than a general influence over the biblical authors as a whole; inspiration extends to the micro-level of the very words found in the original text. This is an important doctrine for evangelicals, and it needs to be maintained. But at this point the reasoning of some (not all) conservative evangelicals begins to shift from defensible doctrine to questionable inference. Each individual word of Scripture, the questionable reasoning suggests, was specifically selected by God and delivered to us from above in a manner very similar to dictation. The words were sent down, one at a time, like crystal droplets. Each word is an autonomous integer, separate from the rest, and each is to be treasured like a sacred gem and cherished inviolate for all time.

Similarly, Mormonism’s popular view of the Book of Mormon occupies some of this same space. After all, we have a dictation process, we have revelation that potentially provides not only the specific words used, but, is capable of correcting mistakes (at least in the original text). And because of this, we often assume some sort of word-for-word translation has happened with the text. This is not so different from this Evangelical perspective. Scorgie starts with this idea of divine scripture and then extends this to an idea of divine translation. He continues:

When it comes to translation preference and practice, the implications of this way of thinking are predictable. Those who view Scripture this way (and not all evangelicals do, of course) favor attempts at word-for-word translation. Translations produced in this fashion are naïvely thought to retain all the precious original words, except that they are just in a different code now. The inclination is to assume that in every language there is a template of more or less exact equivalents to the inspired Hebrew and Greek words with which we started out. This is, of course, not the case at all. If evangelicals are to get beyond their current impasse over translation theory, they will need a more profound doctrine of biblical inerrancy—one that continues to respect the inspired words of the original text but also acknowledges that these words are mere instruments in the service of a higher purpose, namely, the communication of meaning.

I think that they all work the same way (they all certainly work the same way from the perspective of we the readers). If we want to debate inerrancy, let's do it in another thread. At any rate, I am not a fan (which should be obvious by this point).

As for Riplakish. I think you mean that the Jaredites predated Deuteronomy by a very long time, and so it's out of place. I don't get how this is a clear example of an anachronism in the original text -- presumably the gold plates. You mentioned something about "ancient source are those that come through the narrative units" -- did the story of Riplakish "come through the narrative units"? If so, can you expound on what "coming through the narrative unit" means? I'm really not getting it.

The beginning of the Book of Ether reads:

And now I, Moroni, proceed to give an aaccount of those ancient inhabitants who were destroyed by the bhand of the Lord upon the face of this north country. And I take mine account from the atwenty and four plates which were found by the people of Limhi, which is called the Book of Ether.

The description of Riplakish is at best an interpretation of whatever narrative would have been on the twenty-four plates, coming through Moroni's interpretational filters. Interestingly enough, while the Kingship code in Deuteronomy 17 is fairly early (I see it assigned to what has been termed proto-Deuteronomy), it is almost certainly a text that responds to David and Solomon instead of describing a set of rules that pre-existed them. In effect, the Kingship code is telling kings not to be like David and Solomon, which is exactly how the Book of Mormon uses it. I recognize that this is a Moroni interpretation of a history, and not some translation from the Jaredite record, meaning that to place it within the context of the Jaredite record is an anachronism.

To me it seems like the typical problem that 'translation' can solve. The gold plates said 'bad, greedy king', and Joseph Smith fleshes that out with concepts he was familiar with from the Bible.

Perhaps, but this certainly isn't the way that I would approach the text. And I suspect that unless you were already inclined to believe such a proposition, most people wouldn't accept this sort of explanation either. On top of which, this clearly adopts some sort of position on what sort of translation was going on (and it isn't tight).

I don't think this is really the sort of thing that translation alone can solve because it is part of a narrative strategy. We get the first use of these themes to describe wicked kings in reference to David and Solomon and then Nephi's successors. Then we get King Noah. And finally Riplakish. So perhaps this is a sort of unified approach created by the translator. But, seeing that that Dt. 17 and Dt. 18 (18 is the priestly code that parallels the kingship code) are referenced and quoted frequently in the text, it makes the notion of this as a translation artifact much less likely. But I am open to discussion.

[Benjamin McGuire]

However, Joseph Smith didn't know Reformed Egyptian or Egyptian. It would only have been so much gibberish without divine aid. So, as translator there wouldn't be an interpretive step. He could only write what "he was told". In that sense, he would have to leave concerns as to his potential audience in the hands of providence.

If Joseph Smith is just saying what he is told, he clearly isn't a translator, is he. I think that we do not have any particularly useful descriptions of the translation process. I do not think that we can say with any degree of certainty what it involved or how it worked, we can only discuss what it looked like when it was happening.

Even if we had a divine translator providing Joseph Smith with a text, the translation process I outline remains the same, we just change who is acting in which role. We have a text that has an intended meaning for a specific audience (and texts cannot have a sort of universal meaning that is valid for everyone). I find myself asking, was Joseph Smith the ideal audience? Was he merely similar to that ideal audience? And the further we are from that intended audience, do we become increasingly incompetent readers? (All assuming of course that the Book of Mormon is a real translation in some sense of an ancient text).

[hauslern]

Is the Tower of Babel a fact or fiction? Seeley writes that there were other languages being spoken then in the world. So Jared's tongue was not confused what was he speaking?
https://faculty.gordon.edu/hu/bi/ted_hi ... el_wtj.pdf

[Benjamin McGuire]

Is the Tower of Babel a fact or fiction? Seeley writes that there were other languages being spoken then in the world. So Jared's tongue was not confused what was he speaking?
https://faculty.gordon.edu/hu/bi/ted_hi ... el_wtj.pdf

Another good anachronism that is probably rooted in the source text right? I would suggest that we have more than one issue here. One of them is that Moroni is retelling the story he is relating in terms of his own recorded ancient history.

I would also say that the dichotomy of fact versus fiction is largely a modern invention. It is an explanatory narrative. It is a more interesting question to ask whether or not a Mormon or a Moroni would have understood it in terms of fact or fiction ... I think that the whole question in a way (or at least the way this is usually brought up) is with the assumption that if we had an original, untouched record, that it would be this amazing history in the sense that we experience historiography today. I think this is a bad assumption. We have a hard time wrapping our heads around the fact that ancient groups could have these mythologies in their histories and seemingly hold them as factual and fictional at the same time.