DiscussMormonism.com

But first, a public dressing down for someone from the proprietor...

I’m sorry to say that no recording was made of Royal Skousen’s lecture this past Saturday night on “Textual Criticism and the Book of Mormon,” apparently as the result of an unfortunate misunderstanding. (I certainly don’t understand what happened!) I had been out of the country until the night before and I had been without WiFi during the last several days of that absence, and I had assumed that all was under control. Plainly, it wasn’t. Moreover, it seems that we won’t be doing anything in the near term to remedy the defect.

https://www.patheos.com/blogs/danpeters ... ormon.html

Moving on, Peterson noted during the presentation by Skousen:

RS repeats claim (with Stanford Carmack sitting on the front row, right before him) that (especially) the original dictated text of the Book of Mormon reflects strong links to Early Modern English (Early Modern English). The evidence for this is laid out most fully in his books on The History of the Text of the Book of Mormon, The Nature of the Original Language (Parts 3–4) and The History of the Text of the Book of Mormon, The King James Quotations in the Book of Mormon (Part 5).

So for the purpose of this thread, let's take Skousen's research as a given - that the Book of Mormon we have today, the one supposedly given one word at a time via a magic rock, contains language that wouldn't have been used earlier than the 15th Century but which was in use during the period the KJV of the Bible was produced.

What does that "evidence" mean for the Church narrative around the Book of Mormon, and Joseph's role in bringing it forward? Where does it leave the gold plates? Does Skousen's research strengthen testimony, or weaken it?

With my apologies to the Beatles:

It was four hundred years ago, I say,
The English language used to sound this way.
Grammar going in and out of style—
Syntactic usage change can take a while.
So let me introduce to you
The fact you’ve missed for all these years:
Dr Skousen’s ghostly committee!

We’re Dr Skousen’s ghostly committee,
We like to translate plates of gold.
Dr Skousen’s ghostly committee,
We hope you really like ‘Behold!’
Dr Skousen’s ghostly,
Dr Skousen’s ghostly,
Dr Skousen’s ghostly committee!