Gadianton wrote:MG wrote:It doesn't sound like something Brant would say
Why? Well, before answering that, do you grasp the point he's making? Would you be able to restate it in your own words?
I went back and read the whole T&S's article and all of the comments. I hadn't been through all of it. Last night I asked my wife later in the evening just before bed, "Where do you think the words came from that Joseph was reading off of the seerstone in the hat?" She looked at me like, "Huh?" I'm not sure that most members of the church have really even thought about the translation process except to default to the position that God was behind it. I would guess that most members would also default to Moroni being directly involved in the appearance of the words on the seerstone since he was the one that had most of the preparatory interviews/interactions with Joseph.
So this discussion on T&S's was a bit of an eye opener for me as far as pulling Moroni, at least to some extent or another, out of that translation process. The whole discussion and the comments seem to parallel a bit some of the thoughts I've expressed somewhat independently during this thread. Joseph didn't do it by himself. Others were involved. New Testament in the Book of Mormon seems to have been dovetailed into the text 'on the fly' without use of a Bible on the table. Again, this causes me to think that much of the preparatory work was done before hand in a creative yet controlled way. The loose part of the translation. The conceptual mapping and framework. The working of the plates into the narrative by a committee of translators/collaborators.
The delivery...day to day translation...was a mix. The work that was prepared beforehand, and then tranliterated through Joseph's brain/mind into his mind's eye which were then transformed into words on a seerstone. At that point things have tightened up.
I like what one person said in the comments:
As I’ve suggested before, the Book of Mormon is like a million-piece jigsaw puzzle, and we’re just getting started on the massive task of putting all the pieces together.
A couple of more comments I thought interesting:
The Book of Mormon contains a ton of KJV text that is skillfully woven into the narrative and sermons. See Skousen and Nick Frederick for multiple examples. And, of course, there are large quotations directly from the KJV. These were not simply quotations from the brass plates, translated by Mormon and Moroni into some ancient American dialect and then retranslated again by Joseph Smith (or whoever) into King James English. They are reliant on the King James translation. According to eye witnesses, Joseph did not use any reference books as he “translated.” But whoever did the actual translation work had access not only to the KJV but also to Protestant theological texts, which are also quoted now and then. And I’m not talking about someone who just knew the KJV well because he read it a lot. He worked from a physical text. The reliance on the KJV is obvious in, among other things, the attention paid by the translator to the italicized words in the KJV.
What matters to me is less conscious control than the nature of the Book of Mormon. After all the process might involve accessing Joseph brain, memories and skills, without Joseph being consciously involved. In a certain sense I think the question of tight control is irrelevant to the question of the text.
https://www.timesandseasons.org/index.p ... of-mormon/Regards,
MG
You just argued in your post above that they didn't "have use of a Bible," Which is it? 