Stephen D. Ricks wrote:It is necessary that the Book of Mormon have ancient names, whether from the ancient Near East or from ancient Mesoamerica, if the claim that the book is of ancient origin is to ring true.
Our work has shown that the names and the foreign words in the Book of Mormon are ancient in origin, whether from ancient Hebrew or some other Semitic language, ancient Egyptian, ancient Mesopotamian (Akkadian or Sumerian), or ancient Greek.
I believe we have done our homework showing that the names are ancient in origin. The burden is now upon those who deny the ancient origins of the Book of Mormon to show that its names are not of ancient origin.
I haven't read this paper, and I'm afraid I don't plan to read it, but on my reading this quote probably isn't claiming to have shifted the burden of showing that the Book of Mormon is ancient. I think Ricks is really only saying that he has made a case for the ancient origin of names in the Book of Mormon, and that anyone who wants to claim that these names have no ancient origin now has to answer that case. In other words, I read his last sentence not as this:
If you can't rebut my case for ancient names, you have to accept that the Book of Mormon is ancient
but as this:
Skeptics can no longer get away with simply asserting that Book of Mormon names are not ancient: if you want to say the names are not ancient, you now have to answer my case that they are.
The claim that the names are of ancient origin is far short of the claim that the Book of Mormon is ancient. If the Book is ancient then the names must be ancient, but not the other way round: the names could be ancient and the Book could be fake. Tolkien's dwarf names are based on real Norse names.
As someone who does deny the ancient origins of the Book of Mormon, I for one have no big problem accepting that most if not all of its names are at least kind of close to some ancient names. I would be surprised if they weren't: Smith was obviously trying to make give his book an ancient look-and-feel, and making up names that sound like Old Testament names would have been a no-brainer. He wouldn't have needed any great linguistic knowledge to do so, either, because I'm pretty sure that the spacious wiggle-room of spelling and pronunciation variation across many ancient languages and cultures will let one identify some genuine ancient root for even crudely made up fake ancient names.
So an attack by skeptics on the ancient origins of Book of Mormon names would be a deadly attack on the Book of Mormon if it successfully landed, but it's an attack that isn't hard to deflect. As I read Ricks, he claims to have done that deflecting—no more. He definitely hasn't established that the Book of Mormon itself is ancient—but I don't read him as claiming he has.
I was a teenager before it was cool.