DiscussMormonism.com

In looking for information about Skousen's and Carmack's recent presentation, I ran across these two comments about it, from the interpreter site.

Lee's comment seems pretty legit, but Ken's is simply stellar. I don't know if there is literally a person out there who thinks this way, or if this is simply the best example of Poe's law ever, but I present both for your perusal:

From the interpreter post titled: Book of Mormon Critical Text Project:
The Nature of the Original Language of the Book of Mormon

Lee on September 23, 2018 at 10:00 am
So what does that mean for Book of Mormon historicity and/or translation? If the language of issues of the Book of Mormon are primarily from the 1500’s, is this implying that Joseph Smith based it on some text he had found from the 1500’s? Or that the person delivering this revelation to him was from the 1500’s? (Which seems to make no sense at all.) I don’t understand the implications.

Ken Madsen on September 29, 2018 at 12:34 am
Lee,

Your question is shared by all of us, but first things first.

Before we can know why we must first understand what it is. We are learning that the language is outside of Joseph Smith’s reach. Since the 1830’s we imagined the Book of Mormon language was written in some kind of bad grammar adaptation of the English language from the hills of New York State. The fact that it is something totally beyond the scope of Joseph Smith is important. The fact that it is beyond the assumptions of every critic must not be passed over too lightly, though.

To this day people get angry with the Book of Mormon but often they do so without knowing how complex it really is.

For whatever the implications of how and why, the Book of Mormon will never again be known to honest students as a simple hoax.

We study life. Our minds are Newtonian. We want to know the implications of space time and gravity, but first we must understand that nature truly is as complex as Einstein said it is. We may yet discover the implications of why at a later date.

Before we can know the total implications of space, time and gravity, we attempt to discover all that is knowable. Before we derive a simple formula for everything, we have undertaken centuries of research into the furthest reaches of space and time of telescopy. We delve into the tiniest traces of microscopy. We crash together particles accelerated at the highest speeds in giant colliders. We have undertaken super human effort, not only to understand the true nature of things, but to get to the unltimate questions and implications.

Why is nature is what it is?

We expect Newtonian simplicity but the truth is often much grander than we could ever dream.

It is remarkable in itself that the same is true for the Book of Mormon.

https://interpreterfoundation.org/celeb ... t-project/

Oh good grief. There are regular novels with much more historical accuracy and spiritual insight than the Book of Mormon. Read works contemporary to the Book of Mormon and you will find enough to show Joseph had plenty of access to language style and Hebraisms in his linuistic and literary world.

Meadowchik wrote:Oh good grief. There are regular novels with much more historical accuracy and spiritual insight than the Book of Mormon. Read works contemporary to the Book of Mormon and you will find enough to show Joseph had plenty of access to language style and Hebraisms in his linuistic and literary world.

But your mind is Newtonian! Surely you must first determine why nature is what it is...

Using Newton and Einstein to understand the Book of Mormon? You can't make this stuff up.

I wonder what our minds were before Newtonian coagulations... perhaps Jesusinian?

And I suspect he is wrong anyway since our minds are not Newtonian. Some of our science is, to be sure, but not our minds. Our minds now are Quantuminian! And if we dare go down the rabbit hole deep enough we could either be Quantum Loopian or Stringian.

Philo Sofee wrote:I wonder what our minds were before Newtonian coagulations... perhaps Jesusinian?

And I suspect he is wrong anyway since our minds are not Newtonian. Some of our science is, to be sure, but not our minds. Our minds now are Quantuminian! And if we dare go down the rabbit hole deep enough we could either be Quantum Loopian or Stringian.

Howzabout using the GD seerstone to tell us where in the world of f Cumorah is/was?

Maksutov wrote:Using Newton and Einstein to understand the Book of Mormon? You can't make this stuff up.

I know, my common sense is telling this guy is just mocking Carmack, but Peterson has posted one too many nutcase blog entries lately for me to be too sanguine about that. I am so glad to be free of that cultish, isolated environment.

Philo Sofee wrote:I wonder what our minds were before Newtonian coagulations... perhaps Jesusinian?

And I suspect he is wrong anyway since our minds are not Newtonian. Some of our science is, to be sure, but not our minds. Our minds now are Quantuminian! And if we dare go down the rabbit hole deep enough we could either be Quantum Loopian or Stringian.

I actually like the description of our minds as Cartesian, from Descartes until modern times. Cartesian thinking deconstructed everything into parts, it made Frankenstein's monster sound plausible but maybe just too futuristic. "If only we could take it apart a bit more, we'd have it all figured out."

Now, though, thinking is becoming less about components and more about relationships. Systems analysis research has exploded in the last few decades. It's becoming very cross-disciplinary, merging math with physics with social science. We're learning that it's not just the whats, but the many more nuanced hows.

And this approach is not so flattering for the Mormon narrative. That's the one that says this one guy went and asked God. It's the one that says only two choices can be true, the Catholic Church or the LDS. It's the one that says to pray to know it's true and if you don't get an answer that it is, keep praying until you do. It is so closed, so compartmentalised, and extremely confusing.

Yet looking at the Mormon narrative as one of many throughout human history, many upon which human beings coalesce into groups, asking ourselves how, on the whole, an imagined story would grow into an institution and it becomes clearer by magnitudes. Yes, these are things we might expect, this is all human nature, the side of desperate choices and comforts.

Lemmie,

I'm having a bit of an issue wrapping my head around the entirety of the claim. This thesis is about as plump of an onion as the apologists have ever handed over to the rest of humanity in the guise of carefully measured facts. "We've done the analysis, and the Book of Mormon's original text is nothing short of prosaic English from the fifteenth century."

Where to begin? It appears one must first devour two volumes and 25 years of one man's life to answer that question. But I don't have 100$ and a couple spare years to study two fat books just to see. So what? the apologists will say, one could say that about any other scholarly report, and that in no way invalidates the claim. True, except that normally, it's not up to a layman like myself to become an expert in a field I know nothing about to get a feel for the claim, because other comparable scholars will review and we can get summaries from a variety of expert sources. The problem here is that it appears this research, at the present time, like most of what the apologists produce, is of little interest to the scholarly world. Again, they will claim, they guard the work of a modern day Mendel, as time will bear out. Fortunately, if time doesn't bear it out, they'll have another whopper of a theory to fuel the engines in the future.

I've tried to understand what's going on here. But the situation is a little complex, and so, I would like to share some concerns, and I admit some of them may be easy to refute by someone with the right knowledge of the situation, but where else to start without dropping a hundred bucks and a huge time investment into a subject beyond obscure?

My first concern, as Dr. Shades discussed years ago, is that this project is the brainchild of one man's personal quest, with no oversight or feedback from outside sources, with the exception of in recent years partnering with this Carmack fellow. We know that there are criticisms from among the apologist's ranks, WS even bore testimony against this work, but it's all ideological -- the loose translation guys with theories in the water aren't going to let their own life-long hobbies sink. Has anyone within the ranks of the apologists carefully reviewed this work and provided any critical feedback of any kind? From what we're hearing, either the LT guys wave it off, or those hopeful drink it up as beyond dispute.

As I said, this is one fat onion. You begin thinking, okay, how are they going to control for what's really 15th century, and what isn't? Is this going to be another exercise in seeing a face in a toasted cheese sandwich? Just because the Late War doesn't share some of the phrases, wouldn't a better question be, does the Late War also have its own unique 15th century phrases? I don't think this is an easy kind of proposition for establishing serious controls.

But it's worse, because peel deeper, and just what is the original text of the Book of Mormon under examination anyway? We don't have the original text. A couple of the phrases I looked up mentioned in the summary article that gets recycled through the years don't exist in any Book of Mormon I can find online, except for one place.

Recall, that this apparently all started with Skousen himself providing his own Book of Mormon that was supposed to best reflect what the original text would have read. Here's an excerpt from that project:

The Book of Mormon: The Earliest Text wrote:A typographical facsimile of the surviving pages of the original manuscript based on the latest techniques of computer analysis and ultraviolet photography...multispectral imaging...edited by Royal Skousen.....even greater problem is that 72 percent of that document is no longer extant. In contrast, the printer's manuscript...intact since 1903..RLDS...fill in the gaps of original...comparisons reveal that Oliver made about three textual mistakes per page copying from original to printers...so unperceived errors are undoubtedly contained in those portions that we cannot check against the OM, nevertheless...not completely unrecoverable

By working backward from the printer's manuscript and the 1830 edition (one sixth of which was typset directly from the OM), as well as other early editions, it is possible to reconstruct in large degree the original text of the Book of Mormon using the standard techniques of critical scholarship.

And you guessed it, it's only within this "reconstructed" text that I found a couple of the phrases claimed to be 15th Century.

What I gather from the description of reconstructing, is that this reconstructing wasn't an easy task, but took a couple of decades of research to accomplish. That leaves me incredibly uneasy about the project as a whole. I mean, if they can go to an old typset and clearly show that the Book of Mormon said "they was yet wroth" and not "they were yet wroth", then great, now it's on to evaluating the usage of a mere 4-gram phrase. But given the great difficulty of coming up with the "earliest text", there must be some subjectivity here that needs reviewing by other experts before we should accept the phrases scrutinized were actually believably phrases there in the first place. It's also disheartening that Skousen himself has joined in the charge that (I believe, correct me if I'm wrong) the critics are out of their depth, demonstrating clear political motive that wasn't as obvious years ago.

The faithful summary of what's going on here is something like this:

A textual critic spends 20 years studying various representations of the Book of Mormon in a vacuum, coming up with what would be the most honest first edition yet published. He's not an apologist, a critic, nor does he bow to the whims of Salt Lake City, insisting on full control over what gets produced. He is, of course, a believing member, but with a tough spirit and full devotion to scientific truth, he goes ahead and reveals the earliest text in all its bad grammar and embarrassing moments, to the chagrin of his believing, scholarly friends. Perhaps they warned him, "Brother, if you print this, the critics will have a field day with it. Life is hard enough for we apologists already, please be careful with how you represent the most sacred writings of the prophet Joseph Smith." But all that mattered was the truth of the task at hand, and so it was what it was. But then, Lo, after the fact, while continuing to study the material, a triumphant discovery: the bad grammar the scholar gritted his teeth and published anyway, shockingly, in actuality is the most elegant of 15th century prose! And then, what to make of such a thing? One thing we know for certain, is that Joseph Smith couldn't have come up with 15th century poetry accidentally. Whether or not the words were dictated by an angel, we know the most important thing: the critics are all wrong.

The cynical summary of what's going on is something like this:

A Mormon scholar loosely associated with apologetics wishes to restore the original Book of Mormon text. As he gets into it, of course he's wondering, what on earth is going to be the use of any of this? Early on, he stumbles upon a phrase that seems Old English -- he is a linguist and may have read the Canterbury tales or Macbeth at some point, and what if the Book of Mormon really is a literary masterpiece, but with the English from a bygone era? And so during the hard task of reconstructing the text, the target is in mind, and certainly there would be opportunities in those places most difficult to reconstruct, to assure it hits the target. And with the book finally unveiled, a continuing effort to frame it according to what had been envisioned all along as the evidence to test was under construction.

Gad

The faithful summary of what's going on here is something like this:

A textual critic spends 20 years studying various representations of the Book of Mormon in a vacuum, coming up with what would be the most honest first edition yet published. He's not an apologist, a critic, nor does he bow to the whims of Salt Lake City, insisting on full control over what gets produced. He is, of course, a believing member, but with a tough spirit and full devotion to scientific truth, he goes ahead and reveals the earliest text in all its bad grammar and embarrassing moments, to the chagrin of his believing, scholarly friends. Perhaps they warned him, "Brother, if you print this, the critics will have a field day with it. Life is hard enough for we apologists already, please be careful with how you represent the most sacred writings of the prophet Joseph Smith." But all that mattered was the truth of the task at hand, and so it was what it was. But then, Lo, after the fact, while continuing to study the material, a triumphant discovery: the bad grammar the scholar gritted his teeth and published anyway, shockingly, in actuality is the most elegant of 15th century prose! And then, what to make of such a thing? One thing we know for certain, is that Joseph Smith couldn't have come up with 15th century poetry accidentally. Whether or not the words were dictated by an angel, we know the most important thing: the critics are all wrong.

What fascinated me as all get out here is the impetus I had for learning Hebrew in the first place. Was it to get to the original Bible? Nope. It was because of the truth of the antiquity of the Book of Mormon through Hebraisms, the obvious underlying language of the Book of Mormon. I mean Crowell, Tvedtnes, Gee, and then Welch with the Hebrew chiasmus, etc. the hypocorisicons, the goodies of language weirdness wasn't because Joseph Smith had bad English, it was because it was originally Hebrew substrate. So now that that has not panned out, now they find 15th century English to be the substrate. Anything and everything except the English of Joseph Smith's day, of course. First the ancient languages substrates were played out for all they were worth and hundreds of thousands of testimonies were built on just that fact, mine one of them. But now on analysis after 15 years, and long drawn out detailed and linguistic sleuthing it turns out the Hebrew substrate and Hebrew chiasmus turned out not to be so. Chiasmus, for instance, is now known in dozens of ancient languages and has nothing to testify of for Hebrew substrate of ancient Hebrews in the Book of Mormon. Another evidence bites the dust. So are members now going to hold on for dear life to their testimonies for another 15 years until all this gets hammered out, with the honestly foregone conclusion that, well... woops! 15th century English isn't it either, sorry folks! The new evidence has no traction so far as I can grasp, which is very little. But it's enough to realize that this also will pass through the night eventually, unverified and over played. But in the meantime it helped 100,000 maintain their testimonies.