If plates then God

[Morley]

Prominent oral texts
Origin Title Approx. Word Count
Joseph Smith Book of Mormon 269,320
Greek (Homer) Iliad 148,045
Iceland The Story of Burnt Njal 144,000
Greek (Homer) Odyssey 134,560
Finnish The Kalevala 130,430
Italy-Latin (Virgil) The Aeneid 108,170
Middle East Arabian Nights 81,000
Serbo-Croatian The Marriage of Meho 80,000
Iceland The Eddas of the Norse Mythology 80,000
Tonga The Banished Child 43,000
Sudan The Epic of Son-Jara 40,000
Congo Mwindo Epics <30,000
[multiple] Gilgamesh: Man’s First Story 25,500
Spanish El Romancero 25,000
French La Chanson de Roland 25,000
Mali Sundiata: An Epic of Old Mali 24,000
Old English Beowulf 22,000
[Page 258]Spanish El Cid 15,000
Byzantine The Lament of the Virgin 12,000
Turkish The Book of Dede Korkut (longest story) 11,000
Arabia Taghribat Bani Hilal 8,700
Old English Bede’s Story of Caedmon 5,000
Turkish Kokotoy’s Memorial Feast 751

A couple of points.

1

Hales is being so disingenuous here that it's cringeworthy. Even if you don't know better, MG, Brian Hales most certainly does.

The Book of Mormon isn't a text in the oral tradition which is what all of the other texts he mentions are or were--at one time or another. To be a work that's considered to be in the oral tradition, the work needs to have been passed from generation to generation without having been written down. To have a long work that gets memorized word for word, line for line, generation after generation, is quite significant.

That's not what happened with the Book of Mormon. Hales obviously has no shame. I notice that Hales leaves The Quran and the Hebrew Bible off his list--two other texts that at one time were in the oral tradition. Hmm, I wonder why.

2

When you say, "In one instance Joseph is made out to be a country bumpkin with little or no education and at other times a genius of unequaled proportions," who are you referring to that you think stereotypes him that way? No one here has alluded to Joseph as being anything like a country bumpkin. Only Mormon apologists do that.

[Gadianton]

The Book of Mormon isn't a text in the oral tradition which is what all of the other texts he mentions are or were--at one time or another. To be a work that's considered to be in the oral tradition, the work needs to have been passed from generation to generation without having been written down. To have a long work that gets memorized word for word, line for line, generation after generation, is quite significant.

Ouch.

Hales obviously has no shame

He might actually...he posted on this forum once and then ran and never looked back. Fortunately MG doesn't, so...

[Nevo]

He was smart enough to teach, and then become a lawyer through self-study (I believe that's how it went). He was extremely proficient and is purported to have been very well-read, especially so for that era.

Oliver taught school for 5 months at age 22, after clerking in a store and working as a blacksmith. His brother Lyman was hired originally but was unable to continue and Oliver took his place. He was certainly capable of teaching children basic arithmetic and reading and writing, but he wasn't "well educated" by the standards of the day. I think the historical record shows that he was intelligent (at least 3 brothers became doctors or lawyers), but not exceptionally so.

Here are two early letters from him:
https://www.josephsmithpapers.org/paper ... ber-1829/1
https://www.josephsmithpapers.org/paper ... ber-1829/1

[Doctor CamNC4Me]

He was smart enough to teach, and then become a lawyer through self-study (I believe that's how it went). He was extremely proficient and is purported to have been very well-read, especially so for that era.

Oliver taught school for 5 months at age 22, after clerking in a store and working as a blacksmith. His brother Lyman was hired originally but was unable to continue and Oliver took his place. He was certainly capable of teaching children basic arithmetic and reading and writing, but he wasn't "well educated" by the standards of the day. I think the historical record shows that he was intelligent (at least 3 brothers became doctors or lawyers), but not exceptionally so.

Here are two early letters from him:
https://www.josephsmithpapers.org/paper ... ber-1829/1
https://www.josephsmithpapers.org/paper ... ber-1829/1

I concede the point!

[MG 2.0]

The Book of Mormon isn't a text in the oral tradition which is what all of the other texts he mentions are or were--at one time or another. To be a work that's considered to be in the oral tradition, the work needs to have been passed from generation to generation without having been written down. To have a long work that gets memorized word for word, line for line, generation after generation, is quite significant.

Are you familiar with other narrative works that were orally dictated in large chunks over a short period of time (a few months) that resulted in anything comparable to the Book of Mormon? I would guess this was the point Hales was making.

Joseph produced the Book of Mormon through an oral ‘bard like’ method.

Anyone else that has done this…and at the length and coherency of extended text and narrative that Joseph Smith did?

Or is this production a ‘one off’?

Regards,
MG

[MG 2.0]

It’s important to remember this quote from an earlier post:

Multiple witnesses declared that Joseph Smith spoke the words of the Book of Mormon rather than personally writing them.38 This observation separates him from more than 99% of all authors who ever published a book.
Historically, the composition technique taught in schools worldwide is called creative writing and comprises three general steps.
Pre-writing: choosing a subject, creating an outline, and performing the required research.
Writing: making the initial draft and combining sections.
Re-writing: revising, content-editing, and all subsequent drafts.39
When dictating a book to a scribe (or stenographer), as Joseph Smith did, step one is restricted to memory, and step three is eliminated. There is no evidence Joseph engaged in step one in any discernable way, [Page 158]although mental preparations would not be detectable. The manuscript went straight to press without step three enhancements.
Dictating a book without pre-writing or re-writing might be called creative dictation. The advent of smart phones and voice-to-text apps has facilitated cell phone users today to produce long manuscripts using creative dictation and thereby attempt to replicate Joseph Smith’s efforts. The need for a scribe is removed by dictating text messages of 20 to 30 words each (the apparent word blocks Joseph spoke to his scribes40) into the app. These are received in order and copied into an expanding document. Before hitting send, grammar and spelling can be corrected, but once sent, the sequence of the sentences cannot be changed.41 The author does not consult manuscripts or books while dictating.42 Repeat this process 10,000 times until a document of roughly 270,000 words is formed that can be sent to a publisher for typesetting and printing.
Creative dictation is more difficult than creative writing because, as Louis Brandeis, who served as an associate justice on the Supreme Court of the United States from 1916 to 1939 explained: “There is no good writing; there is only good rewriting.”43 Popular novelist and essayist Robert Louis Stevenson concurred: “When I say writing, O, believe me, it is rewriting that I have chiefly in mind.”44 This inherent limitation of creative dictation is probably why none of the authors in the comparisons charted below elected to recite their books from memory and then send them directly to the printer. Even genius-level intellects today pre-write, write, and rewrite their books prior to completion.45

https://journal.interpreterfoundation.o ... of-Mormon/

Regards,
MG

[Doctor CamNC4Me]

Then why is it wrong?

- Doc

[Nevo]

So, what is the worth of the book? As dantana notes in another thread, the book's only value is that it was used as a catalyst to kick off yet another new religion.

But that's not an insignificant thing.

Grant Hardy notes that "the Book of Mormon was probably the first addition to the library of world scriptures after the Sikh Adi Granth, completed in 1604, and while it is not the last — Baha'i and Tenrikyo revelations also fit the criteria — it has been one of the most successful" (Hardy, "General Essays: Reading the Book of Mormon as World Scripture," in The Annotated Book of Mormon, 823–24).

The historian Adam Jortner has called it "one of the most remarkable books in human history — not merely for its content but for the effects it had on readers. . . . The Book of Mormon was not merely a book; it was a religious experience in itself" (Adam Jortner, No Place For Saints: Mobs and Mormons in Jacksonian America [Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2021], 43-44).

(Another promotional blurb, sorry!)

[tagriffy]

You are skirting around the edges without really approaching the serious apologetics that have shown that it is highly unlikely Joseph could have orally transmitted the Book of Mormon as a Super Bard. You are trying to make him into the Bard of all Bards when the evidence doesn’t seem to justify it.

And you keep failing to show credible physical evidence the Book of Mormon peoples existed. Failing that, the only credible explanation is that Joseph wrote it, however unlikely it may or may not be.

In one instance Joseph is made out to be a country bumpkin with little or no education and at other times a genius of unequaled proportions.

Which is it?

Regards,
MG

How about relatively uneducated genius of unequaled proportions?

[Marcus]

*bump

Marcus, did I miss your answers/comments?

Regards,
MG

I hope she doesn’t answer you after you called her the “board nanny.”

Shame on you, MG. You are better than that.

It's one of his favorite Ad hom go-to's every time he feels bested. Never mind that every question has been answered repeatedly....