The "Grolier Codex" worth revisiting?

[tagriffy]

Does anyone know whether the argument presented in "The Sobering Lesson of the Grolier Codex" is still being pressed by today's Mopologists? I wrote a draft response today, but don't want to publish it to my blog if it would just be beating a dead horse.

[Kishkumen]

I haven’t seen it trotted out in a while, but you may want to check Interpreter or Scripture Central more closely. I spent some time years ago challenging the relevance of this to Book of Mormon studies (spoiler: it isn’t relevant), but it would probably be difficult to find that thread.

[Physics Guy]

Any chance of a short summary of the issues?

What I've seen is that the Grolier Codex is the damaged remnant of a late Mayan book about where and when the planet Venus appears in the sky, with astrological illustrations showing various gods doing various things. Its provenance is that sketchy guys sold it to a private collector in the 1960s, and in the following decades scholars noticed a number of odd features in the artwork that suggested the book was a fake, though some scholars also thought it was genuine and just happened to differ in some ways from the handful of other surviving Mayan books. Eventually, scientific analysis of the pigments was deemed conclusive evidence for genuineness. The carbon black was carbon-dated to 1200 CE or so, as the paper had already been, and they found a certain rare mineral in the blue ink that was indeed used in Mayan blue, but the fact that this stuff was in Mayan blue hadn't been known in the 60s.

We're not going to be able to study Joseph Smith's golden plates, so nothing like the pigment analysis of the Grolier codex is going to happen for the Book of Mormon. And Mormon apologists are probably not going to want to dwell on the principle that physical artefacts Trump theoretical argument in archaeology, since this only leads to Jenkins's insistence on a Nephite potsherd.

But I can see the negative apologetic argument that the Grolier codex offers a cautionary tale for skeptics. "A bunch of scholars (though not all) were skeptical of the Grolier codex, but it turned out to be genuine, so maybe the Book of Mormon is genuine, too, after all, notwithstanding anything critics may say." It's not a positive argument that the Book of Mormon is in fact historic, but it might make room for doubt about doubts.

Is that what this is about?

[Kishkumen]

But I can see the negative apologetic argument that the Grolier codex offers a cautionary tale for skeptics. "A bunch of scholars (though not all) were skeptical of the Grolier codex, but it turned out to be genuine, so maybe the Book of Mormon is genuine, too, after all, notwithstanding anything critics may say." It's not a positive argument that the Book of Mormon is in fact historic, but it might make room for doubt about doubts.

Is that what this is about?

That was my understanding of the issue, but perhaps Tim has something else in mind. IDK.

[Marcus]

...We're not going to be able to study Joseph Smith's golden plates, so nothing like the pigment analysis of the Grolier codex is going to happen for the Book of Mormon. And Mormon apologists are probably not going to want to dwell on the principle that physical artefacts Trump theoretical argument in archaeology, since this only leads to Jenkins's insistence on a Nephite potsherd...

And yet, amazingly enough, a recent and thoroughly
bizarre BYU Education week presentation attempted to get around even that by somehow arguing that a nonexistent artifact has "provenance" the way a painting does.

It's not a positive reflection on BYU that it hosts this kind of nonsense.

[tagriffy]

But I can see the negative apologetic argument that the Grolier codex offers a cautionary tale for skeptics. "A bunch of scholars (though not all) were skeptical of the Grolier codex, but it turned out to be genuine, so maybe the Book of Mormon is genuine, too, after all, notwithstanding anything critics may say." It's not a positive argument that the Book of Mormon is in fact historic, but it might make room for doubt about doubts.

Is that what this is about?

That was my understanding of the issue, but perhaps Tim has something else in mind. IDK.

No, Physics Guy summed it up nicely. The only thing I'd be doing is explicating exactly why it is irrelevant. When I did a bit of background on the "Grolier Codex," now the Codice Maya de Mexico I found a key fact that both intensifies the irrelevancy and offers a very different lesson for Book of Mormon historicity proponents. Sorenson omitted the fact that even the earliest radiocarbon tests supported the codex's authenticity. That means all the arguing about the codex took place in a context where the proponents of authenticity had some scientific evidence on their side. Sorenson, at least in my opinion, gives the impression all the arguing was about the internal text, much as is going on with the Book of Mormon. Needless to say, the Book of Mormon doesn't have that.

[tagriffy]

...We're not going to be able to study Joseph Smith's golden plates, so nothing like the pigment analysis of the Grolier codex is going to happen for the Book of Mormon. And Mormon apologists are probably not going to want to dwell on the principle that physical artefacts Trump theoretical argument in archaeology, since this only leads to Jenkins's insistence on a Nephite potsherd...

And yet, amazingly enough, a recent and thoroughly
bizarre BYU Education week presentation attempted to get around even that by somehow arguing that a nonexistent artifact has "provenance" the way a painting does.

It's not a positive reflection on BYU that it hosts this kind of nonsense.

Provenance is only half the problem, though. With the Codice Maya de Mexico, there was never any doubt the Mayans existed. There was never any doubt the writing resembled Mayan well enough to be worth looking at. I presume that similarly, the painting looked enough like Leonardo's style for a debate to take place. The biggest single problem I have with the arguement is that it treats both cases as if the only problem with the Book of Mormon is the provenance issue.

[tagriffy]

I haven’t seen it trotted out in a while, but you may want to check Interpreter or Scripture Central more closely. I spent some time years ago challenging the relevance of this to Book of Mormon studies (spoiler: it isn’t relevant), but it would probably be difficult to find that thread.

I've seen nothing new at either site beyond a note at Scripture Central that the Codice Maya had been fully authenticated. That kind of surprises me, since it was fully authenticated in 2015, which would have been a good occasion to trot the argument out again. Nothing at FAIR, either.

I think I'm going to just let this one sit. Sooner or later, some other disputed find will be authenticated and someone will make a similar argument for the Book of Mormon.

[Marcus]

And yet, amazingly enough, a recent and thoroughly
bizarre BYU Education week presentation attempted to get around even that by somehow arguing that a nonexistent artifact has "provenance" the way a painting does.

It's not a positive reflection on BYU that it hosts this kind of nonsense.

Provenance is only half the problem, though. With the Codice Maya de Mexico, there was never any doubt the Mayans existed. There was never any doubt the writing resembled Mayan well enough to be worth looking at. I presume that similarly, the painting looked enough like Leonardo's style for a debate to take place. The biggest single problem I have with the arguement is that it treats both cases as if the only problem with the Book of Mormon is the provenance issue.

Good point. It is distraction at its best. It takes some pretty high level chutzpah to argue that a nonexistent artifact has a provenance that can be established by what people write about it.(Wasn't there a movie based on something like that??)

[Physics Guy]

The paper was dated early, but I gather that the suspicion was that some modern faker had painted on some genuine but blank Mayan paper. I don't know how much blank Mayan paper has survived, but it sounds as though that scenario was plausible. So just dating the paper didn't go that far to proving the codex authentic. It did rule out a really crude fraud.

I don't know how plausible it is that someone might have found genuine Mayan ink as well as paper, but then made the writing and pictures themselves in the 1960s. If eight-hundred-year-old pigments were found, they would surely have had to be reconstituted into ink from dry crud. Maybe that could be done, or maybe a fraud made with genuine ink is just too far-fetched.

The Book of Mormon clearly starts from a far more dubious place than the Grolier Codex did. There are no other Nephite-era American golden plates in Dresden or Paris to establish that things like the Book of Mormon ever existed, there is no shred of archaeological or historical evidence for Nephites even existing, and we have no physical artefact to study at all. With the Grolier Codex, only a few scholarly qualms about the detailed content of the pages had to be overcome. And the dubious provenance of the codex was no more than suspicious—it was nowhere near as hard to believe that illegal dealers had gotten their hands on a genuine codex as it is to accept Smith's account of angels and seer stones.

There are established Mormon arguments for the lack of evidence for Nephites: they were a small society and all their stuff rotted away in the jungle. There are established arguments for the miraculous "coming forth": you either believe in the power of God, or you don't, and if you do, then Smith's tale becomes plausible. Critical arguments based only on the content of the Book of Mormon itself are probably harder for Mormons to evade, however, because they can't evade what the text says. So if the case of the Grolier Codex can draw even a faint question mark over critical qualms about whether an ancient text sounds authentic, this might mean a lot to worried Mormons, even if it seems moot to non-Mormons.