MG wrote:What I got out of it was that Moroni wouldn't have let some of the modern references that are anachronistic slip through.
MG wrote:OK. Maybe I'm not getting it. But it seems as though on the 'committee' you would want to have some folks that could decipher the symbols off of the plates.
These are both rational statements, MG, congratulations. A vast improvement, as they show that you understood the points being made by your sources.
Moroni has the same issue as anyone -- including God -- who knows how to read Reformed Egyptian. To borrow from Brant's expertise: why would anyone grossly misrepresent mesoamerican agriculture as modern "wheat culture"? Who would even qualify as as a translator to produce this kind of translation?
- Moroni or any Nephite: They wouldn't know enough about the 19th century.
- 16th century reformer: They wouldn't know enough about the 19th century.
- God: God knows enough, and he could teach the candidates above through visions of the future, but
why teach them to misrepresent the text as modern especially when it would just make the world suspicious of fraud, instead of perform a proper translation, which would take significantly less effort?*
- Joseph Smith or any 19th century person: yes, Joseph would know enough about the 19th Century, and you can play the deniability card here as Joseph would have a good reason to misrepresent mesoamerican agriculture as "wheat culture".**
And so, what is the benefit to a native Reformed Egyptian reader learning 19th century culture from a vision of the future in order to do a translation that looks as if it would be a forgery by a person living in the 19th century? There is a single reason. If you dogmatically maintain the official version, that Joseph was reading words off of a stone, then he can't be the one doing the translation. MG, you try to get around this by having the words appear as a product of Joseph Smith's mind and the stone as a screen (perhaps the committee didn't misrepresent agriculture, but then when it passes through Joseph Smith's mind before projected onto the stone, the misrepresentation crops in), but that doesn't work for long quotations of the KJV, as you say yourself.***
Yes, you can maintain the official version by supposing a translation committee, but it's a complication that doesn't make any sense. That's why other apologists appear to give up the official version, and adopt an "expansion theory" where Joseph Smith is the creator of the text, but not in realtime with a stone.
* Skousen has said that the Book of Mormon is a book of 15th century concerns, or something like that. If he intended this all the way, what he's saying is that modern critics are seeing faces in the clouds by seeing the 19th century in the Book of Mormon. If he's right, then a translation committee in the spirit world would have misrepresented mesoamerican agriculture not according to Brant's misunderstandings of the Book of Mormon text, but as 15th century agriculture. The supreme detour has no apparent theoretical advantage, but it supports the brute fact of a 15th century text, if their evidence is correct, somewhat like MG having a translation committee learn a future language to observe the brute fact of the official account of the stone. Skousen's is worse because now the problem becomes: why would you translate an ancient record into the 15th century, but not very clearly, such that to all but a couple of experts with Phd's in linguistics, it still looks like a modern forgery to everyone else in the 19th century? Why not either a) have a 19th century person who is constrained to translate this way do it or b) just translate it directly into 19th century concepts that look like a forgery, instead of 15th century concepts that look like 19th century concepts that look like a forgery?
** I personally don't agree with the apologists that Joseph Smith's mind has a good excuse to make the misrepresentations the Book of Mormon does. I'm just noting the apologist position. And it does make more sense than an ancient committee making 19th century misrepresentations.
*** I see little point to MG's theory of the Joseph Smith's mind projecting onto the stone. The spirit of the suggestion is to maintain orthodoxy only, as it provides no explanatory power, but it fails to maintain orthodoxy in my opinion. It's like the BYU kids you heard about back in the day who would get married in Vegas, have sex, get divorced in vegas, and then maintain they lived the law of chastity. If you can accept this apostate version, you should be able to accept as other apologists do that the official account is wrong.
