Possible Modern Source for the Book of Mormon

[_Gadianton]

It was only after reading a portion of the LW that I became aware of the computer study. I have yet to see a computer study of a text that truly convinced me of authorship, influence, or any other similarly complex question

I have a feeling that computer studies are not yet to the point of determining forgery independent of human analysis or even as a mode of primary analysis. However, any criticism of such a computer studies should make relevant critiques based on current research.

[_Aristotle Smith]

Nothing about admitting the strong possibility of such influence on the composition of the Book of Mormon precludes a divinely inspired translation, though you would think it did judging by the flailing about in apologetic circles.

You are of course correct about this. The problem for most Mormons is the picture that the LDS church has painted about the translation process and who Joseph Smith was for most of the existence of the church itself. Given the picture painted by them, Joseph Smith and the Book of Mormon have to "glow" in some sense. At some point even the most liberal of apologists has to draw a line and go no further when it comes to how much influence the 19th century context exerted on the process of producing the Book of Mormon.

This is not unique to Mormonism. There are still holdouts in Christianity that argue that Chronicles is inerrant, even though it flatly contradicts and borrows from Samuel and Kings. Their presuppositions simply don't allow them to make those conclusions.

The problem for Mormons is that the stakes are so much higher. Even very conservative Christians are willing to see Chronicles for what it is because in reality they just lose a small portion of the Bible, and one they probably rarely read to begin with. The LDS church has invested a lot of time in getting its members to read the Book of Mormon, so losing its lofty status would be a real serious blow to the church. Plus problems like these are all or nothing propositions. I know there are some apologists who are trying to nuance Ether and the Jaredites into non-existence, but pervasive influence from a 19th century source tends to damage the entire book and is probably a bridge too far to travel for most LDS.

[_Nevo]

Frankly, this is getting ridiculous. You are in full apologist mode here. This goes beyond providential reading of history to mythologizing history, introducing angels and Satan as epic characters in the story.

I guess I don't really understand what you are claiming, so I apologize if my responses miss the mark. My point is simply that Hunt's book doesn't break any new ground that I can see. Other biblicizing histories also invoked Satan and angels (see, e.g., Richard Snowden's The American Revolution, p. 306: "And it came to pass . . . that Satan entered the heart of Benedict. And he tempted him to deliver up the strong hold, of which George the chief captain, had made him governor.") If my non-recognition of Hunt's "obvious" importance as a source for the Book of Mormon earns me the dreaded epithet of "apologist" then so be it. I'm not trying to deny the obvious; I just am not convinced that The Late War is a source for the Book of Mormon.

And so your conclusion would be that Joseph Smith did not read the book because it was not originally written for school kids. Is that it?

No, my suspicion is that Joseph never read the book because I think it is unlikely that ever saw it. As far as I can tell, the oft-repeated claim that The Late War was available to schoolchildren in New York State is not based on any actual evidence.

[_Themis]

The problem for most Mormons is the picture that the LDS church has painted about the translation process and who Joseph Smith was for most of the existence of the church itself.

Joseph was the one who created this picture.

[_canadaduane]

But providential histories abounded in this period.
...
My point is simply that Hunt's book doesn't break any new ground that I can see. Other biblicizing histories also invoked Satan and angels (see, e.g., Richard Snowden's The American Revolution, p. 306: "And it came to pass . . . that Satan entered the heart of Benedict. And he tempted him to deliver up the strong hold, of which George the chief captain, had made him governor.")

Nevo, do you happen to have a list of these abundant providential / biblicizing histories? I'm really curious now. I'd like to test these using the scoring algorithm and see if they score as highly as LW or FBoN.

[_Gadianton]

Thanks C-Duane for the link to the Napoleon 4-grams.

According to Torpedo5, there's a pretty consistent density of 1 4-gram/500-1000 lines throughout the Book of Mormon, except for in a couple regions near the beginning of the Book of Mormon, the most dense being within the first 400 lines of the Book of Mormon (cleaned text I have), where there are 5. It has both strong n-gram density and thematic similarities. C-Duane provided parallels between 1 Nephi and 1 Nep(oleon) that are as strong as anything, if not stronger, than the Late War. To quote again what mms found on the askreality site:

The First Book of Napoleon has hundreds of Book of Mormon parallels that do not show up in the Bible, here are just a few examples from the first few pages, notice the sequence:

condemn not the (writing) … an account … the First Book of Napoleon … upon the face of the earth … it came to pass … the land … their inheritances their gold and silver and … the commandments of the Lord … the foolish imaginations of their hearts … small in stature … Jerusalem … because of the perverse wickedness of the people
-Parallels in sequence, The First Book of Napoleon (from the first pages)

condemn not the (writing) … an account … the First Book of Nephi … upon the face of the earth … it came to pass … the land … his inheritance and his gold and his silver and … the commandments of the Lord … the foolish imaginations of his heart … large in stature … Jerusalem … because of the wickedness of the people
-Parallels in sequence, Book of Mormon / The First Book of Nephi (from the first pages)

The destruction of Jerusalem theme, tree of life - it's all in there.

And then there are 5 4-grams. So how to get a handle on how significant that is? To get a handle on it, I refer to a 2009 peer-reviewed paper, On Automatic Plagiarism Detection Based on n-Grams Comparison

http://repository.dlsi.United Airlines.es/334/1/Barr ... ECIR09.pdf

We consider
n-grams due to the fact that independent texts have a small amount of common
n-grams. For instance, Table 1 shows how likely is that different documents include
a common n-gram (note that the analysed documents were written by the
same author and on the same topic). It is evident that the probability of finding
common n-grams in different documents decreases as n increases.
Table 1. Common n-grams in different documents (avg. words per document: 3,700)
Documents 1-grams 2-grams 3-grams 4-grams
2 0.1692 0.1125 0.0574 0.0312
3 0.0720 0.0302 0.0093 0.0027
4 0.0739 0.0166 0.0031 0.0004
Additionally, due to the fact that a plagiarised sentence could be made of
fragments from multiple parts of an original document, the reference documents
should not be split into sentences, but simply into n-grams.

So the first 5 hits with in the Book of Mormon come within the first 3,700 words. 3 are unique hits that occur within about the first 1000 words of 1 Nepoleon (and these are ultra rare, not occurring in KJV or LW). Now given there is only a 3% chance that two 3,700 word documents written by the same author on the same subject will yield a single 4-gram, that the Book of 1 Nephi has at least 3, being very conservative, is impressive. And then upon examining themes and ideas, It's a dead hit.

(by the way, this particular paper concludes that for detecting specific content, the 3-gram is the best)

[_Kishkumen]

I guess I don't really understand what you are claiming, so I apologize if my responses miss the mark. My point is simply that Hunt's book doesn't break any new ground that I can see. Other biblicizing histories also invoked Satan and angels (see, e.g., Richard Snowden's The American Revolution, p. 306: "And it came to pass . . . that Satan entered the heart of Benedict. And he tempted him to deliver up the strong hold, of which George the chief captain, had made him governor.")

Nevo, that bit was covered. It has already been a part of this conversation. As was noted on that occasion, the divine machinery of LW is much more extensive than it is in Snowden. This rather small example you raise is about as much as one finds there. Ye gods your argument is crap.

No, my suspicion is that Joseph never read the book because I think it is unlikely that ever saw it. As far as I can tell, the oft-repeated claim that The Late War was available to schoolchildren in New York State is not based on any actual evidence.

It was certainly marketed for school children, so at least we have been able to get you to stop pretending it wasn't, contrary to the evidence that it was.

I don't see why it would be unlikely that he read it. I think chances are much better that he read this than The First Book of Napoleon. They are better than the chances he read Spalding's work. Given his penchant for reading adventure stories about historical persons, I would say that the chances, when you really think about it, get better and better.

Oh, and Joseph seems to have rather admired his uncle Stephen Mack, who served in the army in Michigan in the War of 1812. This would be one more reason he and his family might have for taking interest in the war and reading a book about it.

In Detroit during the War of 1812, he was given the captaincy of a company; however, the city was quickly surrendered to the British. Mack is said by his sister to have broken his sword over his knee and thrown it into the lake on hearing of the surrender. To save his property, his housekeeper housed British officers and pretended the house and business were her own.

[_Bazooka]

Given the remarkable similarity between the 'torpedo' description and that of the 'Liahona', I would like to understand how Nevo see's that - is it coincidence?

[_Nevo]

Given the remarkable similarity between the 'torpedo' description and that of the 'Liahona', I would like to understand how Nevo see's that - is it coincidence?

I guess we have different definitions of "remarkable." The fact that two nineteenth-century writings contain the words "brass" "ball" and "curious" in proximity while describing completely different things doesn't strike me as especially remarkable.

• Are both objects balls? Not exactly. One is "a round ball" and the other is ball-like ("as it were a large ball").
• Are both objects of a similar size/weight? No.
• Are both objects made of brass? Yes. However, one is "made partly of brass and partly of iron" while the other is "of fine brass."
• Are both objects said to be "curious" in some way? Yes. But there are differences. One is simply said to skillfully/beautifully made ("of curious workmanship") while the other is said to have elaborate clock-like ("curious") internal mechanisms.
• Do both objects have a similar function? No. One is a large, tethered explosive device for destroying ships and the other is a hand-held instrument that provides divine instructions.

If you want to see some actual remarkable coincidences, check this out: http://cs.anu.edu.au/~bdm/dilugim/moby.html

[_Nevo]

Nevo, do you happen to have a list of these abundant providential / biblicizing histories? I'm really curious now. I'd like to test these using the scoring algorithm and see if they score as highly as LW or FBoN.

Hi Duane,

No, I don't have a list for you but you can find them mentioned in the text and endnotes of Eran Shalev's American Zion: The Old Testament as a Political Text from the Revolution to the Civil War. You might want to start with John Leacock's The First Book of The American Chronicles of the Times, which according to Shalev was "the most popular writing in biblical style of the revolutionary era." Unfortunately, the majority of pseudobiblical texts that Shalev cites have not been digitized. They're all available on microfilm though. Shalev refers to Lester H. Cohen, The Revolutionary Histories: Contemporary Narratives of the American Revolution, 23–127, as providing "an examination of the role of Providence in the revolutionary historians' work" (Shalev, American Zion, 210n22).